Meg Stuart: I was invited to make a project for Europalia Indonesia and considered revisiting the themes of memories and ghosts. Arco Renz, the curator of Europalia, subsequently introduced me to Jompet. We spent a long day together in Berlin, saw two performances, ate dinner, we walked around. That was our beginning.

Jompet Kuswidananto: Later, we met again in my hometown of Yogyakarta which is also known as Jogja, on the island of Java. The musicians Mieko Suzuki and Ikbal Simamora Lubys also came, as did the lighting designer Jan Maertens. We visited historical places together and shared stories about personal and political traumas.

Stuart: Jompet took us on walking tours of the city and we visited the campus of his old college. Here, he re-enacted the demonstrations that took place during the student revolution of ‘98, when the dictator Suharto was overthrown, and described his memories of the events. Everything in Indonesia – the atmosphere, the mood, the way people live and how they work and create art – is still influenced by the rapidly shifting politics, as well as the various religions and traditions. We also saw exhibitions, concerts and an incredible street performance...

Kuswidananto:Jatilan, a traditional magical dance from Java in which the performers enter a trance.

Stuart: The jatilan blew me away. In one sense, it felt like a sacred ritual, but on the other hand, it also seemed very chaotic. Some of the opening movements were quite minimal but then, and totally unexpectedly, the dancers entered into a trance. Sometimes they imploded in a formal manner, at other times in a very expressive, dramatic way. They were visited by animals and deities and their ritual costumes were altered by their everyday clothes. It was impossible to tell what was real and what was fake. I couldn’t identify who was a shaman and who was helping, who was being healed, who was sick and who was cured, or if they even wanted to get to their feet again... Nothing was explained. I don’t think the performers themselves knew exactly what was going to happen. It seemed endless. And then, after two hours or so, they would loop back to the beginning and start all over again, guided by the music, which went on and on and on. The many layers of the performance, its radical physicality, and the disorientation I felt while watching it, were all extremely compelling.

Kuswidananto: We also went to a public square where traders rent out hundreds of bicycles and pedal cars decorated with blinking lights. It’s a huge attraction. The square becomes a sort of dreamland, a wonderland.

Stuart: It was a place for escape and fantasy. One of the cars had bright flashing neon lights that read: ‘I LOVE JOGJA’ ‘I LOVE JOGJA’. Which made you think: is this a statement of fact, or is it their way of cheering up the nocturnal visitors? People seemed really happy there, surrounded by bright, flashing, colourful lights. It was impressive.

Kuswidananto: There used to be ‘sound competitions’ in the east of Java: trucks laden with sound blasters would cruise the streets, music blaring. It was banned because of safety issues, so people started to make miniature versions of the trucks, on which they would install loudspeakers. Their main intention, with regard to playing the music, is to showcase the range of their sound system, from the deepest basses to the highest frequencies.

Versteele: How can you explain this fascination for the chaotic use of noise and bright lights?

Kuswidananto: During the dictatorship, not everybody was allowed to speak. People were forced to express themselves through alternative channels, just to be noticed. The tendency you describe is therefore part of a tradition. When Suharto’s regime was toppled in 1998, the people were euphoric: they could finally use their voices to express themselves. Nowadays, people are still taking to the streets and speaking out in public. Every day, they bring crates to stand on, or drive trucks full of speakers in front of the president’s palace. They want to perform. It’s what I would call a performative democracy. This has long been an important topic in my work. How do people use their voices? How do Indonesians make themselves heard? How is it possible to be louder than everyone else? How can I be as visible as possible? Metaphorically speaking, the abundance of light reflects the hope of enlightenment, the desire to emerge from the shadows. At the same time, people are obsessed with darkness. They are afraid of disappearing, of being invisible. I’m very interested in this kind of tension.

Stuart: I think that this process of articulation, of speaking up, of excavating what’s been hidden and bringing it into the light, is a movement of transformation. You burn it up. For many years, I’ve been thinking about ghosts as unfinished business, and the way in which unresolved conflicts affect both our presence and our movements. Our bodies are constantly shuttling between objects, sounds, lights, voices and unprocessed events from the past. This might awaken a dormant presence, whether we like it or not. I’ve always wanted to make a choreography about light and sound moving through the space, triggered by voices, as though part of a secret network. The voice is not something that you can hold, it’s a part of you and yet it’s not. During rehearsals, we experimented with fragments of songs, with the emotional depth of sound, with breathing, with proto-linguistic utterances, with whispering and distortion, with rhythm. Not only to create a sound concert, but to research what it might release in the body. How does it affect your emotions, and what memories does it evoke?

Versteele: Do any lingering traces of the dictatorship still move you as an artist, Jompet?

Kuswidananto: My memories of the dictatorship are very strong. As children, for example, we’d all be taken to see an anti-communist film. Every year, the teachers would take us to the cinema to see it, like shepherds herding their flock. The film shows how the communists of the 30 September Movement kidnapped and murdered six Indonesian generals during a coup in 1965. It was an early 1980s propaganda film that was trying to legitimize the events of 1965-66, when the dictator’s troops executed millions of acclaimed communist sympathizers. The images of the ruthless, merciless communists that we saw in the film are etched into our memories. Even today, the majority of Indonesians believe that the mass killings of the so-called communists and leftists was a good and just thing. The propaganda still represents the truth for many contemporary Indonesians.

Versteele: You once wrote that you hear the movie’s soundtrack in your head when you wake up too early.

Kuswidananto: Yes! Because the kidnappings and killings happened at dawn, I hear the eerie soundtrack of that scene whenever I lie awake in bed at five or six o’clock in the morning. Many of my friends, people of the same generation, have similar experiences. The national trauma is implanted in our brains.

Versteele: Suharto’s regime is not only associated with trauma but also with a ban, at one point, on sad songs. This inspired our research into melancholic music and sorrow in general.

Kuswidananto: During the economically prosperous years of the dictatorship, around 1986-87, the regime wanted to promote development. As a result, they banned sad songs. It was only permissible to play happy music. Broadcasting a sad song was an act of subversion. I was very young at the time and didn’t want to hear sad songs either. It was only after the dictatorship that I understood the absurdity of the diktat.

Versteele: Why did they consider sad songs to be a threat to prosperity?

Stuart: It’s funny, but sad songs seem so innocent and comforting, how could they possibly be dangerous? But in reality, they are the warning sign of dissatisfaction. Sad songs fuel longing, they suggest nostalgia, or a desire for an unknown future. You can’t build a city on sadness.

Versteele: Perhaps sadness can be a motivating factor? It might inspire you to change something. Can’t it be also constructive?

Stuart: If you’re sad because of a situation that you know you cannot change, or if you long for something you can’t have, at the precise moment when you dive into that feeling, sadness isn’t constructive. There’s no construction in disappointment. It doesn’t make things better. Of course, for the human soul, sadness creates a connection, it’s a step towards compassion and understanding and sympathy. Sadness is unproductive but essential. And it’s always around the corner.

Versteele: Do you have any rituals?

Stuart: I can embrace rituals, but I don’t keep them for very long. I sometimes write three pages in the morning, just after waking. Or I meditate. When I go into a new theatre, or if I feel as though I want to reinvigorate my home, I smudge the space with ashes of sage. Saging is when you burn a sort of incense to clear and cleanse the space. It gets rid of old energies. And then you need to open the windows. (laughs)

Kuswidananto: I do something similar. Like most Javanese people, when I enter a new space, I mentally greet the spirits who live there. I can’t translate the exact greeting that crosses my mind then, it’s something like “excuse me, pardon”.

Versteele: Did your parents teach you that habit?

Kuswidananto: No, it’s something that was passed on by my childhood friends. If we were playing outside and needed to pee against a tree, we’d always excuse ourselves beforehand. We thought there might be a spirit hiding in the branches. Somehow, it has become an unconscious tradition that whenever I deal with a new space, I feel as though I’m interfering with new and invisible entities. So you have to politely knock on their door. This tradition is rooted in animism, like all religious beliefs in Indonesia. If you were to remove all the religions, the animist traditions would still remain.

Stuart: When we were in Indonesia, we performed a beautiful ritual together. According to the Javanese calendar, we were there on New Year’s Eve. But it’s not a moment for parties or celebrations. Instead, people go for a walk outside and reflect, silently. We met at around midnight and, without speaking, walked through the city together, through the streets that were, as usual, full of traffic. We encountered other people doing the same thing.

Kuswidananto: Literally translated, the name of this ritual is ‘muted walk’.

Versteele: To return to the jatilan performance you witnessed in Yogyakarta: we deal with trance and possession during rehearsals. Possession, both voluntary and involuntary, is a universal phenomenon. You find it, in different forms, in every part of the world and in all religions. What does possession mean for you?

Kuswidananto: I’ve never been possessed myself, and I’m not totally convinced that it actually happens. But I can connect to the idea of it. Becoming somebody or something else can be a very good exercise in terms of empathy.

Stuart: I see possession as a fiction, as well. It’s a state that we, as dancers, strive towards when we improvise. Even if we don’t know exactly what that means, it’s something we can imagine. And for me, what we can imagine, we can dance. Possession compels you to let go of everything that holds you in its grip: your history, your expectations, your sadness. Perhaps possession can only take place if you’re ready to share your mental space, your unconscious mind, with unknown forces.

Mieko Suzuki: Three years ago, Meg invited me to participate in a project that she was working on with Maria F. Scaroni at HAU Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin: City Lights – a continuous gathering. I’d long worked with visual artists, fashion designers and sculptors, and also performed as a DJ, but Meg said: ‘I want something else.’ So, I started breaking records. (laughs) I smashed records, taped them back together and played loops with them. I thought: other musicians play on prepared guitars or pianos, so why can’t I prepare records? This is also how I used them during the rehearsals for Celestial Sorrow: I’d take a tiny fragment of the track on the record, connect it to the effects pedals and build up the sound. I’m using the record as existing physical material. This all came about thanks to Meg pushing me and saying: ‘I want something else.’

Ikbal Simamora Lubys: I was very lucky. Six months ago, I saw Meg Stuart’s performance VIOLET in HAU Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin. I loved it. A few months after that, I was invited to a workshop at Melati Suryodarmo’s house, an Indonesian artist who knew that Meg would be visiting Java to prepare for her Europalia project.

Suzuki: We met a lot of musicians on Java and discussed what it was like to collaborate with choreographers. Ikbal and I had an immediate connection. Afterwards, I suggested to Meg that we should work with him. I hadn’t heard any of his music, but sometimes you don’t need to.

Versteele: How do you collaborate during the rehearsals? Do you have any rules?

Lubys: Mieko is the sound director and she takes the decisions. I offer my sounds and ideas.

Suzuki: We’d discuss what possession means for us. Is it possible for an animal to invade your body? Is there a difference between trance and possession? Is repetition the most important thing for trance?

Versteele: Do you go into trance yourself when you play your music?

Suzuki: I can reach that level when I’m listening, composing or playing. I enter into a state of intense concentration.

Lubys: When I play music with Melati, I can easily go into a trance, as I can when I play with my metal band.

Versteele: What is a trance?

Suzuki: It can be a deeper or higher state of consciousness. It is elevated, but at the same time heavy. It makes us experience time differently. We know that there are only 24 hours a day, but when I’m in a trance, a minute is not a minute. Sometimes, two hours seem to pass in twenty minutes. Perhaps time ceases to exist when you’re in a trance? There is only the moment.

Lubys: When Meg asked us to make music on the theme of trance, Mieko replied: ‘trance is not about music, it is directly related to time.’

Suzuki: I’m delighted to be able to work with Meg because I’ve always been deeply fascinated by trance. The word ‘celestial’ describes my state of consciousness when I’m in a trance, concentrating intently on the sounds and frequencies. This consciousness makes me feel very tense, and I might see a horizontal line in the air, for example. There is a tension in the air. It’s almost as if this tension cleanses the air, as if a huge pressure has built up, but cannot escape. This feeling is a constant theme in my work. It is what my sound resembles.

Versteele: Apart from taped-together records, what other material do you use in the performance?

Suzuki: I made a lot of sound recordings in Indonesia, such as city noises, traffic, the buzz in restaurants, footsteps, forest sounds, the movement of air. I also recorded a choir singing a capella at a wedding ceremony and a traditional kecak dance that we witnessed. And I bought a metal spring that I also use to generate sounds.

Lubys: I built my guitar from a piece of wood cut from a 300-year-old railroad tie. It doesn’t sound like a guitar, more like a percussion instrument. And I use a stethoscope to obtain really low sounds from my mouth, teeth and throat.

Versteele: Do you draw inspiration from Indonesian musical traditions?

Lubys: Rather than play traditional pieces, I create new music. But I do like the attitude of the gamelan musicians, who play traditional ensemble music in Java and Bali. It’s not about being a superstar or even about the best band or musician. They don’t need a stage or an audience. The musicians play throughout the villages, either in halls or in the homes of people wealthy enough to possess a set of gamelan instruments. They just play, not for a project, not to earn money. They don’t just play for the audience, but also for themselves. I love that mentality, treating music as a spiritual activity.

I had a chance to talk to Meg Stuart after the performance of 'BLESSED' in deSingel in Antwerp. In the presence of a cardboard house, palm tree full of attitude and a thoughtfully looking swan Meg Stuart talked about the time of the past, ideas for the future and her special attachment to 'BLESSED'. The piece, which she herself refers to as a jewel, premiered in 2006 in Ghent. 11 years later 'BLESSED' remains extremely actual, a work of and for now.

In January this year, Meg Stuart was awarded Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement by La Biennale di Venezia.

Congratulations on the award! An award on Life Time Achievement must have a different weight to it.

Thank you and yes, I think the aspect of time, it definitely does something...

The name of the award also carries something of a conclusion to it...

It surely makes me think about how to continue. It makes me reflect on the past but it also makes me very grateful... I have this dancing life and have worked with all these amazing people. And you know, you work and you make another piece and then another. The time goes by and you don’t realize that that has been your life, that this is what you do. So yep, this 'life time' part makes me look back at that time... I also love the work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas (laureate of The Silver Lion, ed.) so to be next to her is really, really great.

Many creations have been created and I am curious about the very starting moment of each new work? What is needed for you to start creating?

I think there are few different parts. There is the impulsive part which relates to what I just came from, a response to a personal experience. Then there is a more technical part, like a material I want to work on.

What do you refer to when you say material?

It is some sort of territory that I want to address but which I don’t know that well. There must be a sense of unbalance, a problem that I don’t know how to solve, something unknown...

In 'UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP' it was about lines and space. I had an image of people working in an industrial way and that intrigued me. With 'Celestial Sorrow' it was the voice I was interested in. In 'BLESSED' I wanted to make a solo on Francisco Camacho. Together with the set designer (Doris Dziersk) we were interested in rain, its feminine quality and the effects it has. A state to which I want to get to is often also another part but most important is that there is an urgency. That there is a drive to dive into somewhere, a need to figure something out.

Is making work a way a of finding answers? Do you end your process with a solved problem?

It might take a while but I hope to find a path, a way through that territory. I search for a structure, an approach within the unknown, a movement language of it. Also, for transitions, for how things will develop. Would they lead smoothly to one another or do we need more short cuts. It is only when I understand the overall structure that I can navigate within it.

Your latest works such as 'Hunter', 'UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP' or the most recent 'Celestial Sorrow' all seem to be looking at the territory of memory, ritual or trauma. A sense of healing is also present. Is that an intention behind these works?

I think dance is healing. Not healing only in a sense of making us feel better but it also allows us to move into darker places and realise that it is fine to do that. To do it together, with other people. To realise that life is not only about what is comfortable but that it is also about challenge and the uncomfortable. I realised that I am interested in both healing and in art and I was wondering about the connection between the two. I think that art physicalizes things that cannot be easily expressed. It puts questions and different issues in space and lets them talk to the subconscious. I really believe it does something..

Can it cure?

I think there are so many influences we don’t know of that come through our genetics, past relationships or through actions in space. I think things are loaded with meaning and it is only now that we are slowly starting to be aware of that. I am interested in diving into this idea. How what we do is affecting us. How do seemingly disconnected elements connect to each other? I just believe that we are in a deep connection with all sorts of things. With art, practice, people that are here or not... That fascinates me.

You say dance is healing, that doing things together is healing. But what about the viewer who experiences the ritual from a very different side, very often in his own bubble?

I am very much caring for the audience. If things get too private in between the dancers I myself don’t find it interesting. Generosity is important to me. I try to find a way to allow the audience to enter into the work and to in a way, be part of the liveliness of it. It is not only about dancers moving, they are also moving in relation to the audience and that is a practice of the work, the practice of how to be with people. I don’t tell dancers how to relate to the audience because I want them to feel in charge of this connection. Not everything is, of course, improvised but there is always a space for creating the experience which happens between the performers and the viewers.

And how about 'BLESSED' where the material is very much set? What is the practice of this work?

In 'BLESSED' Fransico Camacho has given me a beautiful gift of patience. In many other pieces, dancers kept on moving and giving ideas where Franciso would often just wait for me.

Wait for you to propose the material?

Yes, and also just wait for me to make a decision. He would improvise if I asked him to but he would not go for hours. He would propose something and then stop. I found that amazing. Comparing to the last project in which people would share tons of materials and ideas I feel that Francisco had given me an amazing gift of space, time and patience.

Did the work change at all throughout this 11 years?

I think the world has changed. Our relationship to material, to struggle, to surviving and also to softness has changed. And thus the relation to the little story of 'BLESSED' has shifted but the work itself, strangely enough, has not changed at all. .

Did you ever want to change it?

No, for me this piece is like a jewel. I don’t remember much of how it got created but it is one.

Do you treat it differently to other works?

I realized that I made it into a dance piece but it was created in a theatre context. We had a premiere in Ghent in 2007 but the creation happened in a City Theatre in Germany where there was a whole team of people always ready to help us, to try things out. This mix of contexts makes it special.

Sounds like you have still a strong attachment to the work.

To the relationship with Francisco while making it, yes.

You once said that you like movement because It does not give solutions. What else do you like movement for?

I think I have a very wide understanding of what movement is. I have also given myself a lot of allowances when working with it. And even though my body has its habits and movements it prefers over others, I am still fascinated by the whole spectrum of movement and its possibilities.

I prefer the word movement rather than dance because I am not so interested in dance styles or phrases. Though I can borrow some 'dance' here and there I don’t like having too much of it. With movement, you can put something into it, add, erase. I am interested in how movement speaks about our personalities, how through movement do we meet the world and how the world meets us. 'Celestial Sorrow' was more about voice but also about the breath, how we digest, how we take things in, how we express. For me all that is movement. I like how movement erupts from different states such as joy, discomfort or how it behaves within a controlled or uncontrolled body. I feel like there is so much unexplored vocabulary there and I am still not done with it.

What about the difficulties of working with movement, are there any?

Sometimes I feel like people are moving around and I don't know why. When I don’t know what is the reason, intention or task for it.. At times I have this desire for movement to be more exact and clear with why it is there or what it means.

There is also challenge in how to give it to the audience. I know I watch a lot of dance performances because I dance all day but if I wasn’t I would look at movement very differently. I often wonder for the people that don’t dance themselves, how they read it and if movement is the best way to connect with people...

You have premiered your first piece in Belgium in 1991 but you started to make work before that. Since then you kept on creating. I wonder if working as a choreographer is something that can be mastered throughout the years? Are there some challenges that keep on appearing along the way?

I never had a stable company, a space or a theatre to work in. Not that it was a big challenge but I never had dancers for a longer time, that we could live and work together with. That has somehow never appeared...

Did you ever want that?

I did not claim it but now I think, it would not be bad.. (laughter) but I don’t know if it was the challenge or maybe that is just the time of the past.

Thinking about challenge I often wonder which of the territories I worked with such as installation, theatre or film have been most challenging for me. I still don't know. I am also curious about some spaces l never really went to like ballet or opera, I wonder how interesting that would be.

On that level, I will now organise a dance congress in Germany in 2019 and that is for me like super new and challenging.

Will it be some sort of dance festival that you curate?

Yes, it will be 5 days long theory/dance situation but it is still very much in the making. Sort of curation but I still don’t know what it is going to be exactly (laughter). In a way, I am getting some air which is a good thing. I still have touring but, other than that, I will have some space and time to just see what is happening. I think that improvised movie would be amazing but, again that is nothing concrete.

So for now, there are no plans for a new creation?

No! Nothing planned for a year but then, of course, I would not know what else to do so something will happen. Maybe something related to a school but it would have to be with a different than usual approach to teaching. I already have some ideas, still very fresh but present.

Could you share them or are they still in a very secret stage?

I would like it to be something more mobile, something you cannot just learn in a closed studio of HZT or P.A.R.T.S. I have these ideas for more of a mystery school where you would go to, let's say, an older person to teach you his truths and experiences. Where in small groups you would be intensively handed down knowledge of the world and then have breaks. Instead of just taking things from, you will learn through being in a presence of a person. Like this, your soul and body would have physical experience rather than imagining it or watching it on YouTube. Some of it could be exotic but not only. I just believe that there must be a knowledge that can be thought but it does not exist right now. To create some sort of bank of experience where you can be in, that would be great.

That does sound very interesting...

I am so curious! I want to just do that now! (laughter) Now you have heard it as first, so it will go out into the world...

Just before you said that for a year you have no plans but after you probably won't know what to do so you will create. Is that some sort of breathing for you?

It surely not as easy as breathing. The last pieces were really challenging and made me question a lot of things. I also have to think about my life that I missed when I was in a studio. I now question a balance between all this. I never stopped so I don’t know how long it will take for me to need to create even if on a smaller scale. I honestly don’t know where the borders are.

That might be a bit personal but I don’t find myself a dance teacher or even a choreographer until the moment I enter the studio. Then a click happens. Or now when I talk to you, I feel I am in it but when you would switch the recording off, it would immediately feel different. In my mind I don’t live or feel like an artist. When I am in the studio something happens and I can guide and of course, I sometimes have to think of what I will do in the studio but that is not very often. When I am outside of the studio I am not thinking that I want to make art, I am not really busy with it. I guess If I would analyse it I would do much less.

But then it means the work really comes from the inside?

See, I really don’t know... It sounds a bit romantic but it is just, you know, it is something strange.

On 22 June, the American choreographer Meg Stuart will collect her Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in dance in Venice. But before that she will stop in Brussels, the city where she founded her company, with her latest performance Blessed.

“While I’m very honoured, I do think that I’m a bit young to be receiving a lifetime achievement award,” says Meg Stuart with a laugh when I ask her about her Golden Lion from the Venice Biennale, where her show Built to Last will open the 2018 Biennale Danza. Her name thus joins a long list of luminaries, including Lucinda Childs, Maguy Marin, William Forsythe, Steve Paxton and even Anne

Teresa De Keersmaeker, who have all received this prestigious award. Meg Stuart has in common with De Keersmaeker that she works in Brussels. The American created her first evening-length performance Disfigure Study in 1991 in Belgium at the Klapstuk Festival in Leuven. And she founded her own company, Damaged Goods, also in Belgium, in Brussels to be precise, in 1984 (she was inspired for the name by the last sentence in a review of her show, namely that “everyone was seen as damaged goods”). “I was very enthusiastic about the artistic climate in Belgium at the time,” she remembers. “There were several very interesting choreographers, such as Alain Platel and Anne Teresa. And I thought that the conditions were better here, for creation in the long term. I had received quite a lot of support, allowing me to focus on my research, without having to look for a day job, like when I was in New York. But I never planned on living in Belgium.”

Nowadays, Meg Stuart lives in Berlin but she has not left the Belgian capital, as Damaged Goods is still based here and the choreographer returns time and again, among others because of her strong ties with the Kaaitheater. This is also where she premiered her most recent show, Celestial Sorrow, this past January. In the framework of Europalia Indonesia, she travelled to the country to meet the transdisciplinary artist Jompet Kuswidanto. Together they created a vivid/captivating scenography, with 1,000 light bulbs and lamps, whose intensity switches from semi-darkness to vivid light. Like a metaphor for transformation, for how things that are concealed can rise to the surface, the performance obviously refers to the decades of bloody dictatorship under President Suharto. The three dancers were dressed by Jean-Paul Lespagnard, striking a balance between kitsch and an evocation of an invisible world that we fail to notice. The intrepid Brussels designer among others chose to make the performer Gaëtan Rusquet wear shoes whose triangular sole forced him into a constant balancing act, which also impacted the way he moved and danced. “Jean-Paul’s freedom of thought is very contagious,” says Meg Stuart. “I know that I don’t have to give him instructions, he arrives with plenty of ideas. And sometimes his proposals can be quite extreme.”

Affinities and tensions

Jean-Paul Lespagnard and Meg Stuart have been collaborating since Blessed in 2007. But the choreographer has several other long-standing collaborators. Jan Maertens for lighting, Tim Etchells for the text, with whom she is still touring with Shown and Told, Chris Kondek for video… They have already created several productions with her. While Meg Stuart likes to work with a “crew”, it’s safe to say that she likes collaborations. Whether recurring or one-offs, all her collaborations require invited artists to accept to move their practice. “They must be capable of working in an unfamiliar space, to meet another audience, to share, to engage in a dialogue, to produce something unrecognisable,” the choreographer says. When collaborating with someone, you don’t want to work with someone who is exactly like you. You want someone with whom you feel a connection but who is also capable of leading you to something new, that you weren’t aware of. The result is the sum of a series of affinities and tensions. And they must also be capable of improvising during the process. Improvisation provides a space where you can test things, where you can play. You start out in an unknown space without any idea of what you will find there. You discover the work together, and this requires a certain mindset, a certain way of thinking, to experience freedom.”

Blessed, which will soon be revived at the Kaaitheater, is performed by Francisco Camacho (who already worked with Stuart on Disfigure Study). In the show, the Portuguese dancer moves among cardboard silhouettes, including a palm tree, a giant swan and a hut. They will gradually collapse and dissolve under the rain that falls from above. A slow devastation that refers to the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which made hundreds of victims in New Orleans, where Meg Stuart was born. Ten years later, this remains a very topical subject. “This choreography is all about resilience, about how to move forward in difficult times,” she explains. “The title (Blessed) refers to a specific attitude in these circumstances: a rock-solid confidence in the universe, a certain faith. How do you respond when you believe one thing and the circumstances push you to believe something else?”

Meg Stuart always tries to express the unspeakable, whether her creations are extremely abstract, like Violet, or rooted in a very specific context, like Do Animals Cry (on family relations). “The invisible, vibrations, sensations, things that affect us without being articulated, that are part of the subconscious, of the world of dreams.” A quest that she is not yet ready to give up, despite her Venetian lifetime achievement award.

To cross disciplines, the American choreographer has always pushed the boundaries of contemporary dance. Whether it is by putting her finger on the sore spot, or to alter the conscience of its spectators, she continues to believe in the critical power of her art.

A few years ago, somebody called your work a “dance of disaster and disenchantment”. What do you think of this statement today?

“I’m not afraid of tackling head on the dark side of things, which would be easier to ignore, our relationship with our body, or our human condition. I’m not afraid of making the spectator feel uncomfortable either. There is a sense of urgency in my work but I don’t just make a statement about chaos. I’ve always had the conviction that my choreographies essentially expressed a desire for change. Dance is an important medium because it’s inherently critical. It’s a medium that unravels contradictions and refuses simplistic definitions. Dance does not refute complexity, however. On the contrary even, it acknowledges its benefits and urges us to embrace them. All truth contains the opposite of truth.

In my early works, it seemed more difficult to find solutions. I sometimes think that we are all addicted to suffering. To the dismantling of things and to chaos. We sort of hope that we’ll find a way out. This doesn’t mean that I think that we should avoid comfort and facility at all costs. It is important, however, to keep a higher goal in mind: not just a “dance of disaster” but a sort of empowerment, a desire for change and hope. It is important that you come up with proposals in addition to being very critical.”

Do your most recent works propose more solutions?

“Take Sketches/Notebook (2013). This was a collective effort, a celebration of collaboration. It’s a fictional work, but these fictional spaces are crucial. We need them to be able to experience them together, to define the body, the objects together, among ourselves and with the audience. Celestial Sorrow (2018) refuses to put the blame on someone or to single someone out. This choreography sidesteps the intellectual stalemates of the post-colonial debate. Instead it attempts to paint on top of it, to remind us that responsibility and sorrow are shared, and that ultimately everything is just a matter of perspective.”

What do dance and choreography teach you today?

“I never dance thinking that it may charge people’s perception or their sense of time, or teach them that you can exist in different dimensions. Having said that, improvisation, trance, various states, or the reproduction of a gesture may allow you physically to approach those states that have been described by neuroscience, quantum physics or research about memory. Obviously dance has therapeutic powers, but it also allows us to redefine our relationship with the world or to alter our conscious by tapping into the body’s intelligence. It can be a very euphoric experience, and I think that most people have no idea that dance can transform reality like this. We dance for the same kind of reasons that people take drugs. I’m convinced that asking physical and spatial questions, and trying to answer them with your body, in spaces that are constructs, allows you to change your understanding of these questions. I think that dance can make us more open, more compassionate, can teach us to listen and look more attentively. My artistic creations always look at how social relationships are changing.”

Does this also apply to the visual arts and cinema, or just to dance?

“I’m interested in how dance can communicate with other forms of art, and I think that this transcendence is vital. It is important that you interpret dance in its widest possible sense. Language is endless, unlimited. Our interpretation of the notion of dance must also be very flexible.”

Is contemporary dance defined by the intensity or the quality of the movement, rather than by the movement itself. Because in that sense the mere act of putting on a dress could be dance.

“There are a thousand different ways to move around, and several qualities of movement. I’m a little sceptical about how people exploit movement nowadays. Before, it was all very traditional. Cunningham or Trisha Brown, for example, had very clear styles, defined spaces in which to explore movement. Obviously, specialists want dance to mimic the movements of our daily life. But I’m particularly interested in the gestures that are derived from physical and emotional states, in controlled and uncontrollable movements, that are the outcome of intense emotions.”

Everything is dance?

“No, definitely not. Everything is movement, in the way it is thought, executed and understood.”

A few years ago, you created a project called This is the Show and the Show is Many Things. What can a show never be? Are there things you absolutely refuse to include in your shows?

“It would be interesting to see what traces remain of my earliest shows in my most recent choreographies. My first choreography in Europe is over twenty years old, I was just 26 years old. Nowadays I’m still interested in vulnerability. I always try to create spaces that raise questions without wanting to provide the answers, or resolving things. But there is one thing that I really don’t like and that is to see dancers who do not inhabit their bodies. Even though movements can be abstract, or ultra-aesthetic, dancers must exude life, must be sensitive. They should not be empty vessels, or bodies that demonstrate something.

I like a sense of danger. But I think that it has become very difficult to represent suffering on stage, even under the guise of being avant-garde, or with the dancers’ consent. Times have changed. I don’t know if art is still worth it. I remember telling Pina Bausch, after one of her last shows: “Your earlier work was much more powerful. Now your dancers are just dancing! Why aren’t you doing what you used to do? I really think it’s a pity.” And she replied: “In India I recently saw women living on the streets with their children. I saw beggars and mutilated bodies. The world is going from bad to worse. Artists must choose whether they wish to represent the world as they see it or as they would like it to be.”

Did you make that choice?

“I’ve decided not to choose. We are all placed on earth for each other’s mutual and spontaneous elevation. This is our ultimate goal. So sometimes you need to irritate your audience, to hold up a mirror to them where it hurts. On other occasions, you must propose alternatives. Art has the right to get it wrong, but you cannot get caught up in what is politically correct or stick to traditional approaches. Sometimes the result can be quite perturbing and the spectator may not agree with you.”

Tonight you are presenting your choreography BLESSED, which you created ten years agoat the Centre Pompidou. This is a very special choreography for you, right?

“I’m particularly attached to this piece because I created it in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005. I was born in New Orleans. Unlike most of my choreographies, which are usually a collage, this piece has a linear structure, the action is very direct. Blessed has a very minimalist quality and a singular severity, which engages in a dialogue with my earliest choreographies.

The message is still very relevant today. This choreography deals with the ethical debate about how we approach climate change. How to reconcile climatic instability and the resulting vulnerability with our habit of thinking that life is good, that we are safe? Nature is just one of many factors that can overturn our reality. If this piece did not broach these issues, people would stop inviting me to perform!

We all think that we understand the world around us, and this is a very precious sentiment. But I think that we should also try to understand with all our senses, with our nervous system. A voyage is a way of transcending our rational mind. Art is another way of achieving this. Analysing a performance is not enough. You must feel it, let it engage in a dialogue with our subconscious.”

What would you have done if you had not become a choreographer?

“I haven’t a clue. A photographer? A religious fanatic? A homeless person? A psycho? (laughs) I only had two wishes: to travel the world and become a “healer”. But I had no idea whatsoever what this meant!”

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Ecstasy, transcendence and endurance are fascinating themes because, as I see it, they evoke an image of art being a portal you have to pass through. It’s an important topic for many younger artists, and you’ve been working on it for a long time. But before we get to that, let me ask you how it all began. How did you arrive at dance and choreography – was it a kind of epiphany?

Meg Stuart: I grew up in a theatre, and I think that certainly played a big role. Both my parents are theatre directors. Having the chance to see so many plays, watch dancers and actors up close, made an impression on me. But somehow, I didn’t want to act, to play a character, I simply wanted to be myself. I didn’t know what this “self” was, or whether there were multiple “selves”, but there was always that wish. First, I got into sports, like running track; the physical aspect was important. Then I started getting more involved in dance, and at some point, I let the running go. Then I took a dance class in high school which was not about learning to imitate other people’s movements – though I did that, too – but rather choreography. I did dancer studies – standing, sitting, lying – looking carefully at each part of the body, breaking it down piece by piece. That’s when I started coming up with dances without really knowing how to dance. I didn’t have a technique that I’d eventually have to discard later on. First, I had to build a structure and technique around me in order to realise the things I imagined. When I was young, I tried out alternative techniques, but I also studied the “modern masters” – Cunningham, Graham, Limón. I don’t know if you can call that an epiphany, but that’s how I started.

Obrist: You originally come from New Orleans …

Stuart: Yes, I am from New Orleans but my first breakthrough as an artist happened at the Klapstuk festival in Belgium when I was 26 with the work Disfigure Study. Up until then I had been working years on various short studies in New York and these explorations came together in Disfigure Study (1991). It was this first evening piece that launched me into the scene in Europe.

Obrist: I asked about New Orleans because I recently spoke with the singer and musician Solange [Knowles] and the director Alan Ferguson, both of whom live in New Orleans. They told me that New Orleans is so spiritual that it radiates something transcendental and the people there relate to one another in a very special way.

Stuart: I was quite young when I left New Orleans. I can remember the hurricanes and Mardi Gras, but not much more than that. When my mother started working at CalArts, [California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles], I would wander the halls of the institute, watch Ravi Shankar play [editor’s note: Ravi Shankar, Indian musician and composer, appointed professor of Indian Music at CalArts in 1970], see the art exhibitions held at CalArts in the seventies and the dance performances there. All these different art practices in one space – I’m sure it influenced me. My parents often took me to classical concerts. Whenever I closed my eyes and listened to the music, I’d imagine people dancing and moving. I created my own little world, a space where I could control things.

Obrist: It seems you really found your own “language” in Belgium. One of your first pieces that came to my attention was No Longer Readymade (1993) – a piece that deeply resonated with the art world. Can you tell us something about what went into No Longer Readymade?

Stuart: It was my second piece, and maybe it was born out of crisis. Creating a second work while on tour with the first, getting a lot of attention very fast, being pulled out of New York and diving into the European festival scene – that was a lot to handle at one time. The centrepiece of this work is a solo. I’m digging through the trash in my pockets, pulling out receipts, coins and whatnot, spilling the detritus of life onto the floor. Then I take off my clothes, a men’s suit, a women’s suit and my dress ... and I hang them from my arms on two hangers and then start walking on my face with my Doc Martens. And that’s when I asked myself, is this enough for you? What do you expect from this? My previous piece Disfigure Study was like a long research project on distortion and fragmenting the body and playing with physicality and light. But this was an entirely new approach to the question “Here I am, what now?” It was the first time I studied physical and emotional states. The piece opens with a dancer, Benoît Lachambre, shaking his head violently for about four and a half minutes and then gesturing feverishly. Then he starts shaking and does the whole thing in reverse. He’s completely out of control, he’s blurring like in a Bruce-Nauman-video. He’s pushing himself to the limit yet continues articulating in this frenzy. When we started rehearsing the piece, he vomited in the studio. Only after several rehearsals was he able to perform it. It was the first time I was interested in fever and sweat – could this be a “language”? How do we use these kinds of involuntary physical responses as dance material? It was then that I integrated physical and emotional states into the choreography.

Obrist: This piece seems to go beyond the rational; there are irrational forces that come into play. Andrei Tarkowski once said that we need to re-introduce rituals because they have disappeared from the modern world. It’s interesting that ecstasy is regarded as something positive in indigenous cultures and in ritualistic contexts. But in capitalism and in our globalised world, it’s somehow taken on a negative connotation. In your work it clearly has a positive connotation. I was wondering about when the subject of ecstasy entered your work. When you started, it must have been quite unusual, right?

Stuart: From a Western perspective, I think rituals are things we do out of habit, if not by choice. But we’re constantly occupied with such rituals. We create them for ourselves, we’re forced to participate in those of others, rituals are all around us. So, it’s about acknowledging them, and also reinventing them. Rituals are a series of intention-driven actions, just like with magic. Your actions have a certain intention, and you expect a certain outcome. Going to the theatre is a ritual as well. I don’t know how I came to introduce that. I think I’m receptive to energies or streams of energy that are not only my own. We know that everything is influencing our nervous system and our electromagnetic field. Every day we’re influenced by what we see, our consciousness is inundated with information. The question is, how do we deal with it, how do we purge ourselves of it, what thoughts are our own and which are not, and how do we work with these forces?

Obrist: You talked about rituals, but I’m curious about the notion of ecstasy. To a certain degree, improvisation is present in all your works. As you mentioned about your second piece, No Longer Readymade, improvisation was a gateway to all these different states and sometimes ecstatic states ...

Stuart: Exactly …

Obrist: Then let’s talk about improvisation and ecstasy.

Stuart: One inspiration for my last piece Celestial Sorrow (2018) was the very repetitive music of a Jathilan ritual I saw in Indonesia. It was a remarkable performance on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. The dancers performed very simple, 20-minute ritualised movements with their arms. Suddenly they seemed possessed and fell into a trance ... and it wasn’t clear if it was real or not, or self-induced. Some things happened in front of you, and other things backstage. The dancers would take off their costumes and come back in something more pedestrian. There was such absolute chaos that no one knew what was part of the performance and what wasn’t. Was it all just preparation for that moment of release, the freeing of these dark energies? I found it all very contemporary and very complex. So we started crafting our own version together with two musicians. The dancers also go through a kind of trance. I think we all want to escape the reality of our daily lives. We all want to feel that we merge with something else, that we overcome the borders between us and the others. We can take drugs or get high on music and repetition, or lock ourselves in a room and concentrate on our own breathing... I think we all have that wish to work on higher realms, to have a more singular focus, to be less absent-minded and distracted.

Obrist: When I was London I saw your piece Until Our Hearts Stop (2015), which I thought was very impressive. It also had to do with this very different state. As in your earlier pieces, you often focus on the notion of exhaustion and how exhaustion can lead to a transcendental state ...

Stuart: ... or to a nervous breakdown (laughs). Actually, I think we sometimes like being exhausted. I think exhaustion gives us the feeling of being in the here and now, it’s our neoliberal mode, this idea that we’re always working. It’s also about working through the exhaustion in order to achieve a higher state of consciousness where more subtle frequencies resonate. Exhaustion is either a wish or a problem, but it can also be a strategy – a strategy of art-making. You tell someone: look at this, now look at it again, and again ... no, this image is not finished yet. This intensity, this obsession, to over-stretch time, to force people to be hyper-present – that’s what I see as the responsibility of art right now. Insisting on being accountable for where we are.

Obrist: Improvisation was a theme we both explored in Laboratorium – our first collaboration in 1999. It’s a work that is seldom discussed anymore. I’d be interested in hearing your recollection of it.

Stuart: Laboratorium was an incredibly imprecise study that examined the relationship of performance and research, science and research, and art and research. It was the basis for an improvisation, the last piece of a longer project titled Crash Landing, which I put on in Moscow in 1999. We were lots of artists, many of whom were Russians, and the space we chose was way too small for all of us – it was rather uncomfortable. The work was about the future, about the body of the future, and how we see ourselves in the future. Each performer could suggest things. There was nobody saying, “but this is my project”. We were not concerned with individual authorship, but rather a collective working method where everything was mixed, alliances were formed and questions were jointly investigated ... Looking back, I can see it as quite radical in its haphazard methodology of insisting on collaborative encounter through improvisational performance, considering the invitation and the context.

Obrist: It was also about demarcation – between the stage and the world, if you will... It wasn’t very clear where the stage began and where it stopped, of even if there was a stage ... The young Tino Sehgal was also there as a student – that was when he was still dancing and working with Xavier [editor’s note: French choreographer Xavier Le Roy]. I told him that I’d be doing an interview with you and he sent me a question to ask you this morning: Where do you see a demarcation between dance which is meant to be performed, and ritualistic practices like those of the shamans or Shakers which occur off stage?

Stuart: Dance that is meant to be performed is about a set of principles or proposals that is shared with an audience. Shamanistic practice and rituals are grounded on service and intention. Shamans with spirit guides dive into other worlds to heal members of society. This is a service for the community. People go clubbing every weekend, an improvised dance ritual, in search of connection and release and ecstatic shared moments. It is clear that the codes of behaviour are very narrow even in places like Berghain and I can imagine there will be more and more hybrid undefined open spaces in the future for sharing, voicing, releasing and dancing as strategies of survival and healing.

I am hoping that the Tanzkongress in Dresden can be such a lively, unconventional space for collective action and shared intention. We are going to create a five-day gathering, somehow intricately and magically composed, that functions as a social choreography for meeting, exchange, conflict and transformation. A rave deconstructed and other variations of social dancing and encounter are essential to this meeting concept. The rave format in the Tanzkongress would commence early in the morning in that massive hall of Hellerau. A charged political space in the daytime with the removal of the trope of nightlife. It would be a space where people could express themselves freely thanks to a different kind of receptivity. So, in this huge cavern of space, I want to create something fluid that shifts the pace so that eventually the music slows down, breaks down and another space of listening and presence emerges.

Obrist: Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, who came up with the Fun Palace in the 1960s, also described this idea of having moments of noise and silence. Suddenly the rave would fall silent – a rupture from fast to slow. So I love your idea. In 2002, Hortensia Völckers got me involved while they were mapping the future of the Federal Cultural Foundation. It was a utopian undertaking which she worked to make come true. And to this day, the Foundation still possesses this utopian vein. The Tanzkongress is also a kind of utopian undertaking. There weren’t many congresses of this scope and magnitude – in the Weimar Republic in 1927, 1928 and 1930. What kind of rituals are you planning for the Tanzkongress?

Stuart: I’m quite interested in the Monte Verità gathering in Switzerland in 1917 where spiritualists, anarchists and artists came together on the mountain to discuss and share alternative ways of living. In the first Tanzkongress (1927) the dance artists were passionately arguing and looking for definitions that would be unthinkable nowadays like what is dance, what a dancer should be, what is the purpose of dance now? They also describe a legendary party where the whole congress came together at the end. I would have loved to witness that. I’m very interested in the social dimension of dance, dance history, sacred dances, contemplative scores and visualizations, martial arts. What’s important to me is that dance isn’t merely the warm-up for the discourse part, but that both are integrated into the same format. As a curator, what advice would you give me?

Obrist: In 2005 when I was working on the “Theater der Welt” festival in Stuttgart, I had initially planned to do an interview project for the stage, a kind of marathon. In the beginning, it was just me interviewing people for 24 hours, but that got lonely after a while, so I invited Rem Koolhaas to join me. Little by little, it became more of a hybrid format with performances, talks, etc. The interesting thing about your idea, of course, is that people would come to listen to a neuroscientist talk and then see a contemporary artist. Or they come to see the artist but would also hear what an architect had to say. This can help break down professional ghettos and avoid having only dance professionals attend. Right now I’m exploring the phenomenon of dance manias, also known as choreomania or St. Vitus’s Dance which occurred in Europe in the 14th and 15th century. It was a social phenomenon when ordinary people in cities – not professional dancers – would dance and dance until they collapsed from exhaustion. There was an outbreak in 1374 in Aachen. Wouldn’t it be amazing if a dancing mania broke out in Dresden?

Stuart: … Or debate mania! When I shift into different states of consciousness very quickly or turn my attention from the moment, I feel I’m bending the laws of time and space, I’m moving through dimensions. I feel there’s a solid truth you can arrive at through physical practice. Dancers know this, but it needs to be acknowledged in other areas – how certain movements can impact our consciousness. In Hellerau, there’s this big garden in the back, and I hope we can use it to create some common rituals, cook together, engage in other forms of exchange.

Obrist: Well, it appeals to all the senses. Margaret Mead once said that we need rituals that appeal to all the senses. I recently read a text by Dorothea von Hantelmann where she asked: What form of ritual corresponds to the life, the social structure of the early 21st century? How collective, how individualised, how rigid, how open, how liberal should such a structure be? That seems to have some relevance for Dresden.

Stuart: There will definitely be various forms of coming together and celebrating, but also coming together and mourning. Dresden won’t be a five-day party. The congress has a dramaturgy that covers a wide range of aspects and provides space for meditation and movement, but also discussions about non-violent communication, or social justice or the power of intention.

Obrist: There’s so much violence and xenophobia in Dresden right now. It has made me think of your work Alibi (2001) which explores themes of fanaticism and violence. In an interview you described how shocked you were, moving from New York to Brussels and suddenly being in a place where people don’t speak English as their native language. What’s especially interesting is that the Dance Congress has the potential to connect with the population. Brecht talked about creating an “epic” theatre for the masses. Perhaps one could extend Brecht’s theories to dance and see whether it could change the city. Maybe you could change Dresden.

Stuart: Maybe. I just heard about this German-Syrian artist Manaf Halbouni who erected three buses in front of the Dresden Frauenkirche. I would very much like to have a dialogue with the Dresden scene. I’ll also be teaching a workshop at the Palucca University of Dance and the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden (HfBK).

Obrist: Would you say your works are political?

Stuart: When you’re working with policymakers to put on the Tanzkongress, it’s a very different type of collaboration, and a different type of visibility. I often talk about ethics and responsibility. Violet (2011) is a completely abstract piece that explores energetic patterns in nature. It features five dancers with five platonic bodies. It was made at the time of the Arab Spring and the tsunami in Japan, and I asked myself: What causes change? At what moment is there a radical shift in thinking and how do we handle it? Frankly it was a response to exhaustion: I don’t have enough energy for this ... Normally you have all the time in the world for abstraction, it is something cold and detached. You work with lines, forces, geometries, but here we were working with abstract movements under stress in a charged heated atmosphere. There was an urgency and a call. That is why it felt extremely political. For many years and in different contexts I have created and held space for artists, musicians and dancers to exchange and meet. In Sketches/Notebook (2013) the dancers were on equal ground with the visual artists and musician. Questions and ideas were exchanged through shared actions and simply by sharing a working space together. I aim to create a dynamic working space of encounter for the extended dance community at the Tanzkongress.

Obrist: Sketches/Notebook leads me to my last question. I started a project on Instagram which has to do with sketches and notebooks. Personally, I find it appalling that handwriting and doodling is disappearing. So I decided to ask every artist at the end of an interview to write or sketch something that I can post on Instagram – a sentence, motto, a quote. So now, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to ask you for a doodle …

As one of the most influential dance and choreography artists since the 1990s, she is best known for her highly energetic pieces in which performers embody the boisterous longing for presence in relationship to specific surroundings. For example, in the jazzy Until Our Hearts Stop (2015), which was created in a kind of extended living room ambience, she departed from the discovery of a hidden trove of artworks in Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich apartment (many which were believed to have been looted and lost during the Nazi era) and then continued to question what we call love, what kind of magic we are searching for, and how this is connected to the freak inside us.

Meg Stuart grew up in California, studied in New York, lives with her son in Berlin and has her company Damaged Goods in Brussels, where her career began. Having previously been an associated artist of the Schauspielhaus Zürich (2000 to 2004) and Volksbühne in Berlin (2005 to 2010), in more recent years Stuart has entered a new work period, amongst others in collaboration with HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin’s theatre for the independent scene. Works like Sketches/Notebook (2013/2018) create intense temporary artistic communities and visualise the energetic networks developing in between the different aesthetic practices of the members. In this interview, we dig into the history of some works that are no longer on the stage and try to find ways to speak about feelings.

Astrid Kaminski: Is it okay if we speak about feelings? We could frame it within your 2007 piece, Maybe Forever, in which you can undo everything in the future.

[laughs]I woke up very early in a hotel in Zurich, where I just performed Shown and Told with [theatre director and writer] Tim Etchells. But despite being early I felt quite rested and fresh. I thought about going for a walk on the lake and then I didn’t, so I went to catch my plane to Berlin and bought a book on being happy. My new love was invited to teach a workshop on happiness, so I wanted to feel connected by doing some research on happiness.

Did you gain new insights?

Nothing very new. But you can rewrite the experiences of your life, and shifting perspectives about any narrative – not the facts – make people happy. That made me think about jazz music that riffs on standards. You have these standards, these songs, that are very familiar, but the musicians keep looking for their potential – something that you would not see, that is dormant. They are not smashing the songs, but in a way expanding them. They are always rewriting, re-scripting, and collaging and in this way honouring the music, giving it a future momentum.

In one word, what is your art about?

I think it is about acceptance. [laughs] Acceptance that there is never one word to describe anything.

I want to dig into the past for a while. After your first European piece, Disfigure Study, in 1991, you immediately earned a name in dance. This piece is always cited, but I want to look at the one which came right after, in 1993, and was maybe more emotional. It’s called “No Longer Readymade”. It reminded me of Tino Seghal’s early quote about being interested in the Duchamp-tradition in the arts, of something that can change itself and simultaneously remain identical. What was your relation to Duchamp?

The title Disfigure Study says what it was – deconstructing the figure – and somehow this continued. There is a moment in No Longer Readymade which proposes that I don’t give the audience what they expect. I can’t dance for you anymore and there was a necessity to break this kind of contract of expectations, to say: Look at the trash in my pockets. This also is dance.

Turning the loo the other way around?

Yes, but also turning presence into absence by articulating gestures that trace the absence. Like holding a hand that is no longer there.

For one of the following pieces, No One is Watching, you wrote: “She always thought of her life as a movie no one is watching.” How would you put it today?

You are such a trickster! [pauses] I don’t know if I want to speak about being seen.

I think the long silence you just gave is also an answer. Yet you will be receiving the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale Danza 2018, which means someone is watching you.

I would have to go into what it means to be on a screen.

For Manifesta7 you made this film with the Agamben title “The Only Possible City” in which you are crying… But Okay, let’s speak about something nicer: What did you feel when you got to learned about the Golden Lion?

A female interviewer asking a woman about her feelings! Please ask Tino Sehgal about his feelings!

Let’s see.

I cried. It was announced the day before my premiere of Celestial Sorrow [at Kaaitheater, 2018], which I made in collaboration with the visual artist Jompet Kuswidananto. Through an installation of hundreds of lights, the work looks intensively at interior darkness and trauma, processed by voice performances by Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Gaëtan Rusquet, and Jule Flierl. So crying was not that inappropriate. Later we all took a yoga class and I continued crying. After this I made a drastic cut in the piece. It brought the whole thing together.

You are known for very intense rehearsal processes. You even formulated that making a piece is like living through a fiction together. To be in such intense contact with a group of people for several months must be very difficult. How do you deal with everything that comes up? What strategies help you bring the process to a controlled explosion?

I try not to obsess on the outcome too much and to take each rehearsal day as an aim in itself. The vocabulary we use in order to speak to each other and giving everyone space to get lost for a while are also quite important. What is particular about family-like proximity is that everybody has their own rhythm. You have to compose out of this polyrhythmic situation. The process also seems to have an identity or aura of its own, so people come with the idea that they are entering an intensive work; they bring it with them. And one more thing: I always work with the situation as such but also with a utopia. So there are always the questions of “What is there?” as well as “What could be?”

I like one of the fundamental statements in Are we here yet? (2010), a book that reflects on your practice. You wrote: “In any given situation, what is going on in your head and what is going on in your body never exactly coincides.” This, you reason, confronts us with the impossibility of being totally present. But is it a wish to be fully present?

Being really present is now more problematic than when this book was made. I am not that fascinated with the distractions, blockages, and irritations of not arriving. I’m really interested in being present. But it demands an extreme trust that you don’t have to watch over your shoulder, that you are safe where you are. It demands being with your body, being with what is already there. Maybe it is more about being-with than about being-there.

This makes me think about the asymmetrical two stories house from your 2003 piece Visitors Only. Stage designer Anna Viebrock constructed it based on inspirations from Gordon Matta-Clark. Were the two-stories stores connected to altered states in between external realities and internal feelings?

The house was very playful with a lot of fantasy inferring with the movement. The architecture made it very clear that you went from one state into another. The asymmetric spaces and incomplete and destroyed rooms supported these shifts. The house also had some aspects of Alice in Wonderland with tiny doors and slanting walls. But anyway, it was not a psycho-analytical house with the subconscious under the floor and so forth. There was more about the relationship between the house and the body – the body not only as a means of expression, but also as a meeting point of atmospheres and energies, where things are copied, traced, remembered etc., where not only I speak but also others can speak through me.

Another influence and also collaborator was the video artist Gary Hill, with whom you worked for Splayed Mind Out (1997). This is said to be your first piece without concrete movement material. Does this mean that being moved replaces movement-instructions?

Not totally. I teach: Do a movement, let yourself be moved, and then imagine surrendering to your movement. Now be the agent of your movement, own it, and direct it. The way you shift your perception or consciousness between these two is what creates the dance, the way you allow things to happen and the way you shape them. The dance is in the shift, but what makes you move? I think it can be about feelings, yet “feeling” seems to be a very flat word, and it doesn’t say how we move. This is a question of how the person relates to the movement. I always used to say, “I’m interested when movement loses its meaning.”

As Gary Hill writes, “And for everything, which is visible, there is a copy, of that which is hidden.” You don’t create meaning or states that can be named, but you nevertheless try to reach something meaningful. How do you know or feel when it is there?

If a movement loses its known meaning, then it creates space for something else to appear. It is the action of taking something out of its pattern that holds the meaning. But it’s not that I can say all I do is empty the gesture of its meaning. Sometimes it’s a matter of attention and choices, or you set something up and you want to knock it down again. Being meaningful is not a state to be reached; it is like a train. There was also a big shift in my work in recent years. I became less focussed on states and rather started to speak about energy. Does something have energy in itself or not? How can you trace energetic streams or vibrations, and how do you put that into form? The body is not a piano, you know?

In the last couple of years, some big names from the field of choreography moved into the museum with their work, and you also explored different spaces. For example, with the surveillance and heterotopia Highway 101 project from 2000, you went to visual art spaces, like a gallery in Rotterdam and the Centre Pompidou. However, you did not really keep going in this direction. Is, for you, stage still the place?

There were other things. [The choreographer and director of Musée de la Dance] Boris Charmatz invited me to perform solo works in MoMA and I also created Blanket Lady as part of the live exhibition Moments at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. But hard floors and little facilities for lighting are not really the ideal conditions for theatre work and often dancers are asked to perform under these conditions. Yet I am interested in observing how the museum context changes the choreography. So I went to see Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Vortex Temorum two months ago at Volksbühne on the stage – I loved it completely – and then I went two days later and saw the same material as a performance installation.

Under Castorf you have been an associated artist of Volksbühne from 2005 to 2010. What did you feel about what was going wrong with choosing Chris Dercon for director and kicking him out again? Did all these aggressions bother you?

Of course everything after Castorf would have been very difficult. I have to say I did not go fully into what Volksbühne represents for whom and why they reacted the way they did. I’m also here, but I am not a German and this topic was obviously growing much bigger than the facts. Simply spoken I supported the artists that Dercon had invited. And if somebody asked me I’ve always said that dance has a hard enough time being as underrepresented in the theatres as it is and if somebody wants to program it and put it on a big stage: great. Meanwhile Castorf was not that interested in dance anymore. But I don’t want to take sides. I don’t think there is a need for attacking anything.

Since you like poetry I’m thinking of a verse by one of my favourite poets, Tracy K. Smith. It says: “One day I’ll touch the world with my bare hands, even if it burns.” Is there something you would not yet dare to touch?

This is hard to say. I have not touched opera yet, but do I want to? I don’t know. For sure I would love to make an improvised film in an intimate setting, inspired by John Cassavetes, with many brilliant dance artists in it. Maybe I can also say one thing about daring: What I like is the moment in art when vulnerability is not something uncomfortable but something shared.

Ten years after the premiere of BLESSED – a solo created especially for its Portuguese dancer Francisco Camacho – Meg Stuart is bringing the show back to Porto and Lisbon. The piece has aged well, she says; the world not so much.

When Meg Stuart first saw the rain fall on the pocket-sized model that scenographer Doris Dziersk showed her, which immediately became the most auspicious beginnings of a new piece, it did not carry the cataclysmic violence of the environmental apocalypse that it is now impossible to miss in BLESSED. But even that rain falling in droplets from a small sprinkler was enough to destroy an entire world in minutes, Doris assured her. Doris had the idea of working with cardboard and water after spending time in Latin America, with its eternally precarious, eternally temporary cities, which we all believe to be unreal until we actually go there.

Meg Stuart believed in her. At first, the apocalyptic devastation that Hurricane Katrina caused in New Orleans, where the American choreographer and dancer was born and raised, and which she thought should have been the most solid and indestructible city of all, had also seemed like a hallucination. It was 2006 (BLESSED had its debut in Ghent in March the following year) and it was impossible not to associate the proposed installation on the table in front of her with the shock of that disaster, seen in real life, during those unimaginable days in late August 2005.

‘At that time, I kept thinking about how absurd it was that all the assistance in the days after Katrina failed – the whole structure failed – and about the extreme experience of losing everything from one moment to the next. You have your wonderful world, or at least your world, and then suddenly that falls apart... How do you react? How do you live with that? How do you keep your faith? What do you believe in? I couldn’t get those questions out of my head,’ she tells PÚBLICO from Berlin, days before bringing the solo performance back to Portugal.

But at the same time, she goes on, other things were coming into her head: ‘The favelas in Brazil; the homeless people on the streets in our cities; the disaster tourism that leads people to want to visit the most devastated places in Haiti; or… Most of all, I was intrigued by people’s resistance. I wanted to understand how we keep going in spite of everything; what it is that keeps us going.’

During those days, there was something else she couldn’t get out of her head: the body of Francisco Camacho – one of the most exceptional she had encountered in the late 80s, just before she became a choreographer. In fact, she has seen few like it to this day. She couldn’t imagine the rain, which she wanted to cascade down on stage, falling on anyone in the world as well as it would fall on him; there was no one capable of inhabiting, with such mystery and authenticity – holding on as though there were no tomorrow – the little cardboard paradise (a hut, a swan and a palm tree) that we see collapsing before our eyes like something out of a disaster movie, over the course of 70 minutes.

‘That was a long time ago… But I still remember being in New York in those early years, to dance and teach, and someone – I don’t know who – telling me that there was a very special, strong dancer that I had to meet. He did a few things with me in the studio and then, when I went to Leuven to do my first piece, Disfigure Study (1991), I wanted him to be one of the performers. The way he moved was exceptionally intelligent, very precise and very well crafted; he moved with incredible presence, and he still does,’ the choreographer tells PÚBLICO. Since then, they have been in constant contact (Camacho was her assistant on UNTIL OUR HEARTS STOP, which premiered in 2015), but it wasn’t until 2006 that Meg Stuart finally got her hands on the perfect setting for a solo by Francisco Camacho. BLESSED was the piece that she created especially for him and it is, perhaps, even more enjoyable seeing him perform it now than it was ten years ago.

Enduring

To recap: a man, a hut, a swan, a palm tree and the unrelenting rain that still falls on them ten years on. A hurricane named Katrina and a president called Donald Trump (who would have this to say on Twitter about the Paris Agreement: ‘Covfefe’). ‘The world is worse than ever; we are not doing well at all. In 2007, the phenomenon of global warming was still just beginning. Suddenly, it seems that everything has got alarmingly more precarious,’ says Meg Stuart. But she didn’t want to put the weight of that on BLESSED, which actually has a heartening and overtly religious title (if we see a god moving out there, it is not a hallucination). It seems to say: fear not, water is a saviour; it washes away the sins of the world.

Before salvation, however, an entire little universe will undergo harsh punishment: the hut, the swan, the palm tree and the only inhabitant of this lost paradise. ‘I wanted to see how Francisco would handle the heavy adversity of that rain over time. The piece was being written as we were looking at how he danced before and after the water, and how much time it would all last – his resistance, and the resistance of the materials,’ Meg Stuart tells us. Francisco Camacho’s body endured – we all endure. ‘As a performer, Francisco doesn’t allow much of himself to be seen. On stage, he has a very strong presence, but one that does not seem to be associated with an ego. That is why it is easy for us to project ourselves onto him but difficult to grasp him completely. He doesn’t throw his distinctiveness out to the public. Quite the opposite: he lets the public step into that world; into that fantasy.’

He was the ideal soloist for a choreographer with a preference for ‘multifocal’ group pieces in which a lot happens to a lot of people at the same time, or, indeed, for her own solo performances. ‘With Francisco you can work with small, subtle, precise movements; he essentially lets the movement move through him.’ None of that has been lost ten years on. ‘It’s all still there and it’s still just as strong… I think seeing him do this piece now that he is ten years older makes it more real and emotive; more poignant. For me, it’s lovely to watch a mature performer in action and witness a life experience play out on stage. Politically, I think it is important for dance not to be a place just for twenty-somethings. It is important for me to be able to continue dancing too.’

A transcription of an interview with Meg Stuart by Rosslyn Hyams, on the occasion of the French premiere of Hunter at Les Spectacles Vivants du Centre Pompidou.

Rosslyn Hyams: Why did you choose to name the performance ‘Hunter’?

Meg Stuart: “I like one word titles. Hunting has a certain urgency about it. It’s not just searching but actively looking. For a large part of the piece, I am looking into my own personal archive, my movement archive and family history, searching for connections and clues. How do they all link? How did I get to where I am now?”

How much more would you say this is a research into yourself, your own personal history and previous works?

“Making a solo means that I don’t need to explain and translate my ideas to performers. Usually, I shape movement material based on their proposals or the way they move. Here I’m relying on myself. Of course, every person is influenced, is a myriad of others and all the other things that have crossed their path, wanted or unwanted. In Hunter, I’m diving into the wreck, positively seeing what has changed and what has remained since I started dancing. How and what does my body want to express? I always say the body is a container for memory. In Hunter, I am really putting it to the test.”

“You mentioned the word myriad - myriad on stage - with not only your movements and the style of movements but also with the decor, the scenography and sound. Is this very multi-layered, multi-facetted appearance, Meg Stuart?”

“It’s a solo made with others. I invited a handful of collaborators to share the process with me. I gave Chis Kondek, the video artist, some old super 8 movies my father had made in the seventies and we created some original material as well. We even did some reenactments of Yoko Ono’s cut piece and a tribute to Cindy Sherman. The result is a mix between real memory, fictional meetings and reenactments. Vincent Malstaf did the sound design. I asked him to work with sound effects, which creates some almost ‘cartoonesque’ moments but is also quite strong because I’m moving to the sound of keys and doors slamming. I wanted to dance to voices of others as well. When you’re alone in a private space or on stage, you often put on the radio or have unfinished dialogs with other people. So it made sense to not just dance to music but to have other people’s presence through their words in it as well.”

“Towards the end of the piece, two speakers are swinging and creating a sort of Doppler effect. As I am screaming, the speakers are reflecting the sound and bringing it back to me. So Hunter begins with an installation – I’m creating a collage, live on stage – and it ends with a sound installation.“

Dance has evolved as well as where you’ve evolved. Do you feel that contemporary dance is very different today from when you were starting out? Are the challenges the same?

“In the beginning I was searching for a language that related to a resistant body, looking at it in fragments. It was a lot about ‘no’, as opposed to ‘yes’ - a kind of anti-virtuosity. I wouldn’t say it had a punk-aesthetic but it certainly had a big mode of resistance. Over the years, I’ve opened up on all levels. Experimenting with many different styles and approaches. The speaking, conscious dancer, expressing the state of things is something very present in performance - especially as dance has moved into the contemporary art world. Maybe it’s a reflection of that. It’s not enough just to criticize and to show an air of resistance on stage, it’s also to imagine possible outcomes or solutions, or at least to dream together on how things might be.”

On the occasion of the three week festival ‘The Winter Laboratory’ (WinLab) at Independent Dance (London), curator Frank Bock talked with choreographer Meg Stuart. This is a transcription of the talk the two of them had.

Bock: Before the interview we spoke briefly about the fact that you are not showing work here. To be invited here to talk about you’re work, without actually showing work, feels somewhat strange, doesn’t it?

Stuart: Normally when there is a talk, people have come to see a performance. There’s always an experience or reference point to start from. To be here, talking without that, is something new for me.

Bock: I imagine you’ve already given a lot of talks about your work, presenting yourself in a certain way and I was curious to have a conversation with you about what moves you and what kind of material you are interested in. The way you work with identity for example, who we are, what we can inhabit, what or who through our bodies we can inhabit.

Stuart: In terms of movement, I very often work with the idea of a fluid identity. Are we capable of completely changing who we are or do we change only what we pay attention to? In a series of movement, I sometimes think more anatomically, other times I focus more on the thoughts inside my head, the images I produce or the gap between what is there and what I put out. For example, in one of my solo pieces Software, I’m constantly morphing from one identity or image to the next. It can start of on the surface, very classic and poppy but then it changes and becomes more about the distorted vision people can have about themselves. It becomes a fluid operation where there is a tempt to go into something but there is always a moment of detour where you reach for something that is recognizable but then it curves, becomes something else. It’s this searching for the curve between things that interests me.

Bock: Can you say a bit more about the abstract? Earlier you told me that the body can never really be abstract, that it is always full with something or someone.

Stuart: During the workshop we talked about the difference between abstraction and reality. I think they are quite close to each other. They seem very different at first glance but once you’ve unpeeled the layers, you see the connection quite clearly. I work a lot with imagination and exteriorizing my potent inner world. You can dissolve into your imagination. You can become something else. You can dance with invisible forces, traces and presences and even become them, dissolve into what you see and experience in the world. It doesn’t always have to be produced, it can simply come to you as well. It’s not just about being there and marking the world but allowing things to move and transform through your actions.

Bock: You work a lot with authentic fiction, the idea of concretizing states and living them in a certain way…

Stuart: Yes, it’s about living inside a certain circumstance. Realities and truths can change rapidly. For instance, I know something to be true right now but it is possible that in a few moments the set of rules will have completely changed. I talk a lot about micro narratives, partly because when I first started dancing, I thought of partnering in terms of equality: I lift you, you lift me and we lift each other. Later on, I decided to introduce a set of conditions, as you might do in a more theatrical scenario. This creates a different perspective on the concept of time. You create a different kind of urgency. One move matters because there is a next one coming. The past has meaning because it influences the now. As a choreographer, working with this set of conditions is very important to me, because it adds weight and meaning to the work and makes it harder to resolve.

Bock: So you work with accumulation rather than with narrative? Through accumulation, you create histories on stage?

Stuart: It’s hard to say. With every new piece I ask myself the same questions: “Who are these people? How do they move? What is in the melody of their movement? How stylized are they? Are they people or are they energies?” The conditions of who is moving aren’t clear right away. There goes a lot of work into that and once that is established, other things appear. The word narrative has a bad connotation and anything that gets close to it, seems dangerous. I’ve always been attracted to things that are ‘not done’ in a way. So I’ll say that it’s narrative, just for the fun of it (laughs). But I think it really is micro-narrative, which means that when it happens, it could be just for a spot in time, it could last for over an hour but it can also collapse. I made this piece, called BLESSED, where the performer, Francisco Camacho, moves around in a cardboard set. After 20 minutes it starts to rain. The set begins to dissolve and turns into trash. This is probably the most narrative piece I have ever made. You just couldn’t go back, recut and set up. This is what’s happening and this is how it will end. So the piece was more about how to respond to this inevitable course. How does the performer respond to what is happening to him? It was very interesting to be working with this set condition that works almost as a text. I usually don’t work with text and I enjoy playing with forms and structures and mix them up but this piece was a nice break. And in the end Francisco doesn’t freak out. There are moments where he almost lets go and questions his faith but ultimately he adapts and becomes completely part of what is happening around him.

Bock: In a way, the set is writing and I remember you talked about dance-writing as well…

Stuart: Yes. What I mean is that the body has its own intelligence. There are certain things we don’t understand but we have the capacity to translate them physically. And it isn’t always clear where this information comes from. Do these words or moves come from within me or do they come from somewhere else? This interests me.

Stuart: You brought this book called The ontology of the accident by Catherine Malabou. It talks about destructive plasticity. In the book, there is this woman, who ages in an instant. The aging here isn’t something that happens continuously, but in the blink of an eye. I always thought of plasticity as something positive: We can reinvent ourselves. We can shape shift. We can change and channel and move. We have the freedom – or pressure even – to reinvent ourselves at any time. But then there is this destructive plasticity: You get Alzheimers or someone dies and things change irrevocably. You become a new person.

Bock: We have touched on the idea of trauma and this negative plasticity seems to refer to the idea of being so old that you can’t relate to your old self anymore. You become the other to yourself. This is a counterpoint to the self-development we spoke of earlier and I’m curious what your response might be.

Stuart: I think she says there will always be a limit to the incense of reinvention. At one point it stops. At first, this idea made me sad but then I thought: “Ok, it stops. Now what?” At one point she says:

Life can be defined as a harmonious agreement of the movement of the body. This is the definition of the health of the organism, assuming an accordance between its parts. On the other hand death occurs when the parts have their own autonomous movements, thereby disorganizing the life of the whole and breaking up its unity.

I find this funny, because when I started out, I was quite certain I was working with trauma. Esthetically I thought it was cool: I put up my arm out like this and I don’t know what my hand is doing. I was playing with the idea of something that is happening with my body but I’m not really present, I’m completely vacant. This was completely against my training and against being in a harmonious whole. When I read what she wrote now, I feel much more interested in recovery. Some parts could be numb, dead or not there even but we keep on moving because we have to. We are figuring out how to move but we are still in dialogue with other people, we are still communicating. I find it interesting how things sort of twinge or get excited when they are in proximity with something or someone else.

I’m always talking about changing states. You’re in one state and you radically change to another and back again. Lately I realized it is not about changing, it is about staying. It is staying with something more than you want to, committing. You let it linger. You feel it but you can’t name it. It’s just a way of thinking about things and it can change as well. I used to think I was obsessed with trauma but things have changed. In general, I feel that things are lighter, more integrated now.

Bock: But the process of recovery is about the integration of something positive happening. In her book, Catherine Malabou talks about a kind of indifference. She uses examples of French workers in the 80s who lose their jobs or lose their identity with Alzheimers. They become a shadow of who they were and they almost have no relationships. But when I hear you talk about states, I think there is something of trauma in that. Something can start from zero and go to ten really quickly and turn into something else. I think trauma couples the coming up of fear and anger. Say these two states can be completely locked into each other and it can be quite arbitrary as well. Things can get over-coupled in a very powerful way, having there own intelligibility but not necessarily fitting in an everyday narrative.

Stuart: And you can’t always control what triggers them or how they lash out. She describes Alzheimers as if you are both alive and dead at the same time. Having no memory is as close as you can get to being dead. I have had moments where I was grateful that I didn’t remember anything and I love that when I’m dancing with people, I often can’t remember what we did afterwards.

I have a question for you, that actually is a line from my solo Hunter. When you don’t have any memory, what do you dream about? I wonder if everything would be blurry or if we would digest the day but get the subtitles all wrong? Do you know what it would be like?

Bock: Memory is based on image and affect. It is based on experiences that have some affective quality. Anything that has a certain quality of emotion in it, will stay in your system. Anything that has a certain quality of emotion in it will more likely stay with you. We need things that have some sort of felt quality.

Stuart: Do you work with transpersonal or false memory, as if you would remember experiences that aren’t your own? Does that happen with people you work with?

Bock: These facts of a story haven't always felt important. I haven't really looked for facts in that way partly because I work in a more aesthetic way through phenomenology. So I am interested in the aesthetic process of describing pasts.

Stuart: Do you mean the way people talk about their past?

Bock: Yes, how they speak of it. There is a quality to how I’m receiving what they say. It isn’t about searching the truth or trying to piece together what might have happened.

And you were talking about that in Hunter?

Stuart: At a certain point I mention it, yes. In Hunter there is a big section where I am blogging and chatting. I talk about people that influenced me, cultural heroes. I mention Trisha Brown and the fact that she is losing her memory. I’m only talking about memory for a short moment. But often when I’m dancing I have had the experience that I’m remembering things of people that I haven’t even met. Maybe I have met them or I wanted to have met them, like a fantasy. As I told you, when I first started out, I was working with trauma and the idea of something that is happening with my body but I’m not really there. Over the years I started wondering: “If I’m not really there, who is there? Other people could be! I can channel and filter or even be a psychic.” That is what started it, what cleared the space to play with it as material. It can be people or energies or even something more abstract.

Bock: It is a very potent idea of picking in other people’s memories and working with this sense of selfless, wider body. I recently read an article about the use of words. It said that every time we use the same word, we’re altering it. Every word, every utterance of life somehow has a carrying forward of experiences.

Stuart: And would there be an end of it, like the expanding universe that at some point has to retract again?

Bock: There is a limit to everything?

Stuart: I think we are very much aware of limits. It is like a collective hangover. We have done so much and now all of a sudden, there are these limits and they have timelines and deadlines and they are real. It moves our conscience about what is happening now and the choices we are making.

Bock: Do you refer to limits in terms of capacity?

Stuart: Yes. For now everything is fine but one day it will end and we won’t be able to do this or that. It is about resources and the sense of depletion.

You have your practice, you’re involved in dance but you are a psychiatrist as well. Do you think dance is healing?

Bock: That’s a good question. There is something about experiencing art that is healing. It allows a re-experiencing of life. Art has the capacity to connect people. So yes, I would say dance has a potential for healing, but not in the sense of “Get up and dance!” and then you’re cured.

Do you experience that in your work? Do you feel as if you are making a difference?

Stuart: I feel grateful to be able to expand the borders of what I am and to meet people in this other force. I guess it keeps me sane. Years ago I wouldn’t be sitting here at all because I had a lot of problems with talking but step by step and by what has happened with my work, I opened up. I like dance because it doesn’t pretend to have solutions. We translate what we know to be true and keep shifting up the experience of it. I wouldn’t say Pina Bausch healed her generation, but there was a lot of collective trauma in Germany and she put it out there and into imagery without saying “This is my topic” or analyzing it. I’m sure that it wasn’t her mission but for a certain period of time, it meant something.

Sometimes I feel this obsession with healing goes too far. Do we have to be healed or have healing experiences all the time? But it does interest me in a way. I once made this kind of kinetic sculpture where all the dancers and the audience laughed together. Of course, I know that it’s good for your health and it can also be a practice but what interests me is the idea that you go to see a performance and that together with the dancers and the rest of the audience, you become part of the sculpture.

Bock: Are you talking about All together now?

Stuart: No, this one we did for the Politics of Ecstasy with Jeremy Wade. It opened the festival and it was very simple. Afterwards we had a silent diner on the floor. I know that it is close to other practices but I think that it is something that is happening in general: Dance is pulling into the visual art world, looking for information to use, looking to create different kind of works. There is a merging of people’s skills. We are trying to build other kinds of structures and other ways of solving problems or relations with people, which I think is very interesting.

Bock: This way of accessing relationship through the body and through collectivity is very interesting. There are certain things that you can do with embodiment that are being wanted by other art forms.

Stuart: Making art is hard. You are giving something and questioning it at the same time. I think it is part of the process and an important aspect for me as well. What do I stand for? What do I construct? How do I speak? What is my work about? You’re constantly putting yourself on the line. It is confronting at times but at the same time very important.

Bock: You work a lot with other artists so there seems to be a great interest in meeting other people and figuring out how they work…

Stuart: I like working together and to be in a space with other people. If I would go back in time and decided to make work in a room all by myself, I probably would have produced things as well but I somehow find it fascinating to see other artists making their work. They could be the script or text and I imagine their work and try to put myself in it and meet them.

Bock: Were you on your own in Hunter ?

Stuart: I’m the only one on stage but there were a lot of people involved. There was a video designer, a sound designer, a stage designer, a dramaturge, … It wasn’t just me slogging it out on my own. I have had some moments alone for sure but not that many. Of course, there are very different forms of collaboration. Is every decision going to be made together with the other person or is it you who in the end makes the decisions?

My company and I made this book, Are we here yet? , which was published for the first time in 2010 and has recently been reprinted. It is about the company’s work and mainly about the politics of collaboration and making work together. It contains exercises as well.

Bock: Did you change or add anything in the 2nd edition?

Stuart: We changed only a little bit. It was out of print so there had to be a new one.

Bock: Did you want to?

Stuart: No, I thought it was pretty good the first time (laughs).

In the middle of the book, you will find a series of exercises and the first one is ‘Look at your own body as if you were dead’. The second one is; ‘You’re the last person on earth’, and another one: ‘Your personal future body’. They are rather unconventional exercises. I didn’t even realize that I had exercises because I normally just freewheel in the studio but Jeroen Peeters (editor of Are we here yet?) pointed it out to me and convinced me to share them. The first one might seem a bit dark ‘Look at your own body as if you were dead’ but just lie down, imagine you’re dead and see if you move. Just start from there and see what happens.

Bock: Do you still dance?

Stuart: I’m happy when I’m dancing. If I don’t feel good in my body, it’s very hard for me to lead or to teach a group because I feel that a lot comes through. I can make a new work while sitting on a chair, just by watching people, seeing how they move. I guess I get really fascinated by other people. But I have to remind myself to get in there. I feel that it’s very important. So yes, I still dance.

Bock: From a wish to be 'in the material' differently?

Stuart: I still surprise myself. Sometimes I know that I’m doing this or that again but then there are times when something just pops out or I end up doing something that comes from a place I don’t understand. I think that is important. You often start rehearsing, thinking that you are going to do a certain scene but when you start dancing with other people, something completely different comes out of it.

Bock: And you follow that?

Stuart: Yes, or I just look at it.

Bock: And do you have a sense of the other bodies that are in your gestures?

Stuart: Definitely, I feel as if my work is made through other people. Over the years, people have been coming into the work, shaping its tasks and scores with their own interests and their own work when we meet. So they are making and shaping the work as well. And if they reconnect, it feels as if you’ve met them. But that is just one practical way, you might be mean on another level…

Bock: Well, I guess it maybe relates to an idea of channelling which you often talk about. I am now thinking about you and Philipp Gehmacher and if the two of you take on some imprint of each other. How actively are you working there with an attunement to a sense of you that is wider than your own?

Stuart: I think you refer to a piece I did with Philipp Gehmacher that is a very specific dialogue. I made two pieces with him and we have a kind of ongoing dance connection. We don’t articulate what we’re talking about but we are talking about histories and events that are not spoken out. Through the misunderstanding, we come to an understanding. It can be very practical, for instance, the interest in working with the arms or with the gestural body but it is a very unique connection.

Bock: I like the idea of communicating through misunderstanding. There’s something very rich about that: Knowing that there will always be something that you are missing, something that is incomplete but you do understand a provisional meaning.

Stuart: Good dances are made in that mode. You have to dance to find out more. You don’t dance to prove yourself right or to prove the other one is right or to prove a theory right. You dance to keep talking in order to get closer and to understand. I’m very fond of that idea.

Bock: You have to keep moving.

Stuart: Yes.

Bock: Does anyone have something to add?

Audience: Isn’t all communication based on misunderstanding? Can we ever fully understand the other?

Bock: I believe it is an ongoing project. We never really arrive.

Stuart: I feel very comfortable with being disoriented, not only dance-wise but in general. I long for it. I live in Berlin and my German is ok. I can speak a bit and to a certain level, everyone understands me. But some parts will remain missing, like gaps and for me that’s a relief. It creates space to be my own world. It triggers this personal response. I become more aware of all that is between an experience or a dialogue or between two people. In general, there is a lot of projection. While talking with others, we put a lot of stuff in front of them that is not theirs, just by being there. The fact that we understand what people are saying, that we understand their words, doesn’t mean that we are really present. I think that is something performance can do. Maybe it’s because you can manage the time and people are forced to stay. It might seem old-fashioned but it is a very precious thing to be able to say: “Look at this. This is fascinating. Pay attention to this!” To insist and find out that they are willing to accept your insistence because they are sitting in a chair and the lights are out. I think that is very special about this set up as opposed to other set ups.

Bock: Distracted set ups…

Stuart: Yes, distracted. This is very special about performance. Even if it feels as if we question it all the time: “What are we doing as performers in these old-fashioned theater spaces? What is that?”

Audience: You talked about the fragmented body and the attempt to connect to the body and I’m curious how you relate all that to the aging body.

Stuart: In Norway, people are supposed to retire at the age of 42. So when you get there, they tell you you’re done. I guess that is one way to deal with it. Aged body, experienced body, knowledgeable body… What to do with it? It creates a certain urge. For now you still have the energy and the power but how do you transmit it? What do you share? How can you offer what you have before you loose interest or it becomes too tiring to jump around? At a certain point, this question occurs. But it seems as if things are changing. Young and old aren’t two separate entities anymore. Last September, there was this event, organized by Peter Pleyer in Berlin about New York in the 1980s. Sasha Waltz (my roommate in New York in the 80s) and I were there, Yoshiko Chuma and a lot of others as well. It was a mix of younger and older dancers and it was nice to attend an event where people aren’t sectioned into different groups. It is liberating to see that something is shifting in the world of performance.

Audience: Do you go back to dancers you worked with on many occasions and do you work with that past? Do you incorporate it in your work? Or do you prefer working with new people, people you don’t understand that well yet, in order to go back to that gap where there is room for exploration and misunderstanding?

Stuart: It is usually a mix. I reconnect to people that I’ve worked with before. They could have worked with me on a piece right before or it could have been years earlier. But I always invite new people as well, to balance the two. In terms of my own work and my habits as well. I would say you have this integrated body, as opposed to the fragmented body and you are integrated or connected to very strange things. I see that when I’m making work. You combine this weird image with that thing or with this spot. The idea that the connections are stretched or not necessarily obvious is another sense of integration and of connectivity that is not just…

Audience: … just a position?

Stuart: Maybe. Not always. What I wanted to say is that there are ways to create another sense of being connected.

Bock: So it is a kind of ‘smashing things together’, that don’t necessarily go together?

Stuart: Yes. It’s funny. It might seem as if I know what I’m doing but I often feel that I don’t know that much about anything. I think that keeps me young. Or is that silly?

Audience: Do you think if you would understand completely what you are doing, you might lose the ‘surprise of the physicality’?

Stuart: Yes. That is interesting. You try to force your own misunderstanding, as if you are looking for your own amnesia. But then there are moments when you know it and you face ego and a lot of other things. I think you have to keep checking. It’s not that surprising…

Audience: I think it has a lot to do with the other person. You don’t know exactly who this person is but you work with him. Your work is a lot about this ‘not knowing’ and I wondered if there were moments where you collaborated with someone and it didn’t work, because of this ‘not knowing’. Has this happened and if so, how did you react? Were you flexible? Or did you think: ‘Not again this way’?

Stuart: I give people a lot of space and I very rarely tell a designer or artist what it exactly is that I want. That can be pretty tough, especially if, for example, you’re a designer making the set. They are pretty much in open hands. I give keywords of course. They are not completely in the dark but yes, it can be quite hard and sometimes I don’t say enough. It happens that the sound designer makes a score and wants to put music in every single moment of the performance. Then it’s very hard for me to say: “Not right now… and not here and there either”. That happened to me with someone I know really well. But when I feel that I can’t give somebody honest feedback or that I can’t be direct, there’s a problem. They could be the most brilliant artist or dancer but that means that something is blocking, me or them. That’s what happened with this musician and I haven’t worked with him again even though his work is brilliant. While working with him, it was hard for me to be direct and then things go wrong.

I had familiar experiences in my younger years, while working with famous visual artists like Gary Hill, Ann Hamilton, Bruce Mau. I was the younger one and to me, they were the big star. I was impressed by them and had to keep myself from saying: “Just do whatever”, which wasn’t easy. I was overwhelmed by their presence and collaborating with them didn’t go so well. It didn’t go wrong either. The pieces went well, but I had to jump over something. I didn’t give up. When I’m not sure about something, I get pretty silent. Afterwards I’m happy when I do know. Things can spiral out in the process for a while and other people might panic, but I don’t. I can just let it hang. I’ve known to continue after a deadline so I’m pretty tenacious with the project.

Bock: I remember reading somewhere that the sound and light people you work with very much enjoy the process of working with you because of the space and knowledge of theatre that you bring. The 'safe hands' that you are, is somehow really trusted.

Stuart: That is something that I have earned through time. Just to reassure younger makers: In the beginning, it didn’t feel like that at all! With every proposal I would do - maybe because I worked a lot with friends - they would have doubts or disagree. That was hard. Later on, when I had made a few pieces that worked, all of a sudden that changed. In a way it becomes harder as well. You have to start battling your own history, your own limits. You have to deal with yourself. It doesn’t really get easier but people start trusting you and in that set up, you start to trust your own choices. It’s a kind of gift that comes with sticking to what you believe is true and hanging in there. But in the beginning it felt as if you had to convince everybody about everything, including yourself.

Audience: How much is your work set? How much is free? I imagine that you have quite a long making process. How much do you trust that in the performance things will appear the same way as they did during the rehearsal process?

Stuart: It gets quite specific and detailed, even to the point where I say: “This part has to look improvised so don’t do this and that and that.”

Audience: You’ve talked about states. In a performance, how much is there actually about finding the states? How much is that just part of the process? And when you have actually found this form or shape that you tried to achieve, how can you achieve it in the performance?

Stuart: By doing it more, doing it when you’re not in the mood, doing it again, doing it every day.

Audience: So it becomes like a second skin?

Stuart: Hopefully.

Audience: This summer, I saw your performance with Boris Charmatz in Berlin, as part of the Musée de la Danse. The two of you were doing this play with memories: “Do you remember this?” And I wondered how much of that was a mode.

Stuart: This was absolutely not set. It was an exposition with Boris Charmatz. It will come to the Tate in May so you will get the chance to see it. Boris and I have a kind of shared dance history, a spotty one but a shared one, and we play this game where I do a move and say “Do you remember this?” and then he’ll do a move from a dance I might or might not know and then he repeats the phrase to me. It’s a game for an improvisation, a structure for an improvisation. Nothing was set in this case. There was no rule.

Audience: No, but I was amazed how much you were using the archive of your work. It made me think that your work is quite set because you can draw from specific moments, which are very small and very detailed.

Stuart: Yes.

Audience: I have a question about the title of your company ‘Damaged Goods’. Can you tell me where the name comes from?

Stuart: It was the final line from the first review that I got on my first evening length piece in 1991, Disfigure Study. I don’t remember if it was a good review, actually. It probably was ok. At the end the author wrote: “Everyone was shown as damaged goods”. At that particular moment in time, when dance was quite virtuosic and quite energetic, it felt a bit ‘anti’ and I liked the idea that someone would be selling a dance company as damaged goods. It stuck and I still like it and now and then I ask myself if it should still be called damaged goods. But it’s still there and it’s still transiting, still moving, so it’s a part of the work as well. The company is still going. It gets support in Belgium and Brussels since the very beginning.

For the past twenty years American dancer and choreographer Meg Stuart has brought her vivid and fractured impressions of subjectivity and narrative to the theatrical stage. Restlessly prolific, she has collaborated with numerous artists, designers, musicians and performers to evolve a singular dance language of intense emotional charge. Adam Linder talks to her about resistance, collaboration, and the importance of images.

ADAM LINDER: With over twenty years of theaterworks, multiple collaborations, solo performances, improvisation events, and performance films, has the avoidance of a singular category of artistic output been intentional?

MEG STUART: I was really surprised by the response that Disfigure Study (1991) had in Europe. It was my first piece and quite a rupture from the dance language that I had been taught back in NYC. But it was never my intention to do ongoing choreographic research solely based on movement distortion and the resistant body. It could have been much easier to make the next piece with those same investigations, but I didn’t want to. Usually my self-critique and self-questioning still lingers from a previous work and this motivates ideas for the next.

LINDER: Do you mean there was pressure on you to work serially afterwards, to carry on exploring the same ideas as a way of building on the success of this work after it was first shown in Belgium?

STUART: Well, it took me two years to make the next piece, so I was able to put a very different piece forward – No Longer Readymade (1993). In this work the notion of failure and the physicality of emotional states were introduced. So between those two pieces I was able to say, »Don’t fence me in, I’m not only going to have this or that language«. That was a critical moment where I had to search for what was next and not repeat myself. At the same time, while touring, I was getting to know many artists and presenters in festivals and there was a big desire to start working with interesting artists, to deepen our exchange beyond »Have you seen my work?« or »I’ve seen your work«. So I collaborated on creating setups for us to improvise together. These situations weren’t always easy but they certainly made the conversation more vital and honest.

LINDER: In putting a distortion on the »Release Technique« body [Trisha Brown’s dance vocabulary and the codification of an attitude toward »weightlessness«], was that something you were personally resisting, or was there more of a fundamental critique of »Release« at stake?

STUART: I felt like the language I was taught to move or dance with was inadequate. There were interior conflicts that I had to deal with in terms of working through questions about what belongs to you or is absorbed by you,or how you experience things. One important decision was the need to slow things down. At the time in 80s NYC I would see many dance pieces which had the same homogeneous notion of timing.

LINDER: A kind of harmonious sense of infinity?

STUART: Yes, there was always this sort of endless flow. It was hypnotizing! I would see a performance and I wouldn’t remember anything afterward. I wanted something to seize on my memory, I wanted to hold something, but then it was just gone! This sense of evaporation was irritating. So in my work I let singular movement proposals extend longer than was comfortable and embraced active stillness. There was an insistence to look at dance not as a continuum or whole but to notice details again and again and again – this rupture of timing just had to happen. I was against this »holistic« thing. I decided to work with stiffness, resistance, to not warm up … there was a lot of pain those first years (laughs). You took classes related to »opening up spaces in your body«, so everything was soft, embryo-like, utopian. I felt I had to invent something else. Though I had to do it with a lot of seriousness, it couldn’t just be »here are ugly forms«. There was a lot of reverence for performativity; there was nothing casual or nonchalant about the dancing.

LINDER: I remember you saying once that seeing Pina Bausch’s choreographic work back in NY had a big impact on you, and I wonder how you reflect on this now, and how it relates to your decision around a decade ago to position your productions within the institutional structure of Schauspielhaus Zürich?

STUART: I see a large part of Pina’s work as dealing with the collective wound after the war. When language and rationality didn’t work anymore she found a way to translate loss and disillusionment into images and actions. You don’t just have a shared body of dancers in costume variations, basically you have individual points of view, individual stories. People with strong faces sharing their stories with just a few words. These were all keys for me. In relation to Zürich, before going there I made a series of works (Insert Skin, 1996–1998) with visual artists. I had seen so many star collaborations in NY in which choreographers and artists worked together with a big budget but then just stayed in their disciplinary spheres, and I wanted to challenge this: I was interested in collaborations with visual artists based on shared principles of the body and movement with no particular outcome. It was an intense period. That’s when I worked with Ann Hamilton, made a piece with Gary Hill for documenta and also did something with Mikhail Baryshnikov.

LINDER: That piece with Baryshnikov [Remote (1997)] strikes me as an anomaly in your oeuvre in that it was such a reduced proposal. Here’s a dancer known for classical pirouettes and doing lots of them – and the idea for the piece is never the turn, just the preparation. This smells to me more like a conceptual gesture. Is this the most distilled and maybe analytical artistic gesture you’ve made?

STUART: I asked the eleven dancers to deconstruct the preparation of a pirouette and then I choreographed the variations, so it became an extended non-event. Certainly for Baryshnikov it was a challenge. He had to stop turning, just do the preparation and on top of that in a group and not solo! (laughs) That was the opening scene of the piece but I have to say there were other interests in it too. I guess my work has many interests, perhaps too many, but if you use a magnifying glass you can also see singular investigations, singular proposals in the works.

LINDER: Has working on singular or reduced ideas been a kind of antidote to the large-scale theatre works? And vice versa?

STUART: I don’t think there has been one or another. My work is composed of a series of questions and proposals that I suggest to my dancers or collaborators and which are usually answered through improvisation, which I record on video. Then I construct a work out of it. My works take time, even demand it; many of them last two hours. There is never just one idea or position. I don’t like work in which you know from the beginning that the same premise and conditions will continue until the end.

LINDER: Was there a particular intention to move your work into a state-run theater? In relation to theatricality and working with sensibilities that were not »on trend« in other parts of the dance landscape, did Schauspielhaus Zürich and then Volksbühne in Berlin offer an audience and a reception that you couldn’t have had elsewhere?

STUART: I stepped into the Schauspielhaus Zürich to share a house with Christoph Marthaler, Stefanie Carp, Anna Viebrock, and all these craftspeople and specialists. It was a chance to meet directors, stage designers, older actors, and performers. Of course I knew I was taking a step away from a certain side of the European dance scene but I didn’t feel so much part of that anyway. Addressing theatrical concerns was the complete opposite to what was going on in dance at that moment – everything was conceptual, everything was minimal. I often put myself in uncomfortable zones, because I have to prove something to someone. I don’t have a problem with theatricality as such. For me this is an open term, relating to events taking place in a theater. I love fiction and often I have to consider how hidden or transparent these fictions are.

LINDER: How do you navigate working with different people and, in particular, with the personal and emotional »material« of performers? You are the type of choreographer who works a lot with the subjective contributions of your performers, rather than a scenario where the performers simply follow a script.

STUART: The dancers are asked to contribute to the process in the improvisational material they offer – and to realize in the end it’s not about what they offer but about the work as a whole. That what they offer as performers will not necessarily land in the piece. I take my time looking for people who want to be in the situation of co-creating the work to a certain extent. I have huge respect for all of my dancers and their differences. I always see them as group of individuals sharing a world together, never as a troupe sharing a dance style.

LINDER: I read a 2008 interview with you where you said: »I only realized two years ago that my dancers have been performing a perverse form of slapstick all these years.« I found this intriguing because »slapstick« as a performance sensibility is more or less off-limits according to certain currents in European contemporary dance.

STUART: This thing of »my body is not mine« or »I’m propelled or moved by forces unknown« are of course notions that I’ve worked with and are related to a basis of humor – like my work with malfunction, and the virtuosity of that.

LINDER: But isn’t it also a metaphorical »slapstick«, in light of the ways in which you have insisted on theatricality, which can seem a perversion to certain accepted tastes in dance?

STUART: Or even having sidetracks that you can’t explain. Like in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut when the guy starts walking the street and explains: »I don’t know why, I just went that way.« In theatrical situations, which are temporary conditions that can’t be reversed, things are at stake. There is an urgency, and consequences while moving.

LINDER: Am I allowed to call you the godmother of psychosomatic dance (laughs)?

STUART: Do I have any godchildren, I don’t know! »Psycho- so-matic-dance« how do you define that?

LINDER: That internal processes related to psychology and emotion are externalized and expressed through the moving body.

STUART: But I think images are also very important – either becoming landscape or entering stills or frozen moments.

LINDER: But isn’t it still a memory-based relation to images?

STUART: No, not always.

LINDER: What I mean is that I see the legacy of your work and this approach to movement in the work of a number of choreographers of my generation and a generation above me; it’s interesting to reflect on how these genealogies evolve.

STUART: I don’t know. At the moment I am obsessed with the future. How will dance evolve – in what spaces and social frameworks? I have started to collaborate with [stage designer] Jozef Wouters and [dramaturge] Jeroen Peeters and invited artists to imagine a future contemporary art center. How would we rewrite expectations of funding bodies? How would we design a space, and what is the notion of a »center«? Is one specific location even appropriate? For me this is the conversation about legacy. What can we give to the next generations of choreographers? Can there be a new set of conditions for choreographers in the future that redefines our understanding for what an artist in residence is as well as the relations between artists and presenters/producers? If you get fictional, it is very easy to imagine that airports will be the art centers of the future.

I usually work with musicians who compose a soundtrack during the creative process. For Built to Last I wanted to start with existing, overpowering, symphonic music. As a human being, how do you deal with the enormity of it? In collaboration with Alain Franco a series of pieces have emerged, resulting from various traditions of classical and modern music. I didn’t carry out a mathematical analysis and deconstruction of the works, I simply responded to them on an emotional level. What is it that music releases in us? Slavoj Zizek says something very interesting in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: “The same music that served evil purposes can be redeemed to serve the Good. Or it can be read in a much more ambiguous way. With music we cannot ever be sure. In so far as it externalises our inner passion music is potentially always a threat.”

The soundtrack acts as a time machine. The dancers move this way and that in history. They unfold a new consciousness in every scene: for themselves, for the space, for the music, for each other. Many dance sequences have emerged from an exploration of changing laws and codes. Many of my other choreographies stem from a certain state of mind. But in Built to Last we let the music force us to adapt to new forms, time and time again. In each form we looked for complex, subtle manoeuvres. The slightest movement, a single glance, can make iconographic, monumental pictures into something ambiguous and human.

The expression ‘Built to Last’ betrays a belief in eternal values, heroism and universality. At the same time, we have the urge to continue reinventing ourselves. We have to move forward. Many things are designed to break after a short time. There is also the sense of an approaching end. Everyone is preparing for it. It is sad, but that’s the way it is. Maybe Built to Last is about how, in the light of eternity, we can practise taking our leave, practise dying.

In Meg Stuart’s BLESSED a white-clad man in sandals — picture a Brazilian hippie passing a lazy day at the beach — traverses a stage that resembles a storybook island. His flattened movement gives him the two-dimensional air of Nijinsky on holiday. But there’s something not quite right about this strange scene: the set, which features a palm tree, a hut with a chair and an enormous swan, is made entirely of cardboard. Soon enough it begins to rain. There’s trouble ahead.

“You have to think about questions of fate,” Ms. Stuart said in a telephone interview from her home in Berlin. “People in spiritual decline often think, ‘Why do these things happen to me and not to someone else?’ ”

Beginning on Thursday, New York Live Arts in Chelsea presents the American premiere of BLESSED, welcoming Ms. Stuart back to the city where she lived and worked starting in the mid-1980s. This acclaimed 2007 production, with a score by Hahn Rowe, also reunites her with the Portuguese dancer and choreographer Francisco Camacho.

In 1991 Ms. Stuart, an American choreographer and improviser whose influence on the European dance and performance scene is extensive, made Disfigure Study, the work that put her on the experimental map. “The piece was very physical and concerned with movement language and choreography,” Mr. Camacho said. “But I think she was also trying to touch feelings and emotions, and that made us dig deep into the work. Like with BLESSED, it put our bodies in a different place.”

Since the premiere of Disfigure Study Ms. Stuart, who was born in New Orleans and raised in California, has lived in Europe. Berlin is her home, but her company, Damaged Goods, is based in Brussels, largely for financial reasons. While her appearances in New York have picked up in recent years, her choreography — especially the group works — is all too rarely performed in the United States. Her group, which shifts according to project, was named after a line in a review by the American critic Burt Supree: “But it’s failure that absorbs Stuart, the body’s stubborn, fumbling thickness, its sticky desires and cruel inefficacies. And everyone is shown as damaged goods.”

The man in BLESSED has surely suffered some damage, yet for Ms. Stuart, Mr. Camacho’s calm presence solidifies the spirit of the work, which has more to do with his reaction to the collapsing world — somehow he withstands the trauma — than to the collapse itself. “He’s such a sensitive dancer,” Ms. Stuart said. “He has so much poise. It’s not like if I make a solo for him, it’s all about flash.”

The work develops slowly to reveal the effects of time and is, in part, a wordless morality tale, which balances the formality and the serpentine theatricality that grace all of Ms. Stuart’s work.

Yet despite her sustained success Ms. Stuart is intrigued by new territory. In Are We Here Yet? (Presses du Reel, 2011), a book exploring her artistic practice, she writes: “I’m still learning to make dances. I don’t feel I have a formula.”

In conversation Ms. Stuart’s accent blends the cultivated sound of someone who has lived overseas for years with something a little more surfer girl. For her next dance, she said, she will work with classical music.

“Can you believe it?” she asked, before adding a whoop of laughter. “With emotions and theatricality and a Beethoven symphony — well, just some of it. What does it mean to work with a monument like that and experiment? It’s like how people occupy public spaces now in order to reclaim them. It’s somehow reclaiming this music.”

BLESSED, essentially a solo with a couple of appearances by guest artists, was a way for Ms. Stuart to revisit her New Orleans roots. The production was first shown two years after Hurricane Katrina, and the influence of the disaster is palpable, notably in the way that Doris Dziersk’s set is gradually washed away by rain.

“I lived there until I was 5,” Ms. Stuart said. “My memories are of hurricanes and big water beetles and Mardi Gras. It wasn’t about, O.K. now I have to make a piece about Hurricane Katrina. It just came out, and it connected to a lot of things I’ve been about: people dancing as if it’s the end of a relationship or the end of the world — ‘what if’ scenarios.”

As the landscape shifts onstage and the rain persists, Mr. Camacho plugs away, finding shelter with soggy cardboard and, later, transforming his body into shapes that conjure religious images. Ms. Stuart and Mr. Camacho both found the 1999 David Lynch film “The Straight Story,” which features a man driving a lawnmower across rural America, particularly inspirational. As Mr. Camacho put it, it gave him permission to be a man who’s “losing control of things around him, but he still goes on and on.”

It is that perseverance that defines Mr. Camacho’s doggedness in the work, which, as you might expect, is not easy to perform. The rain, for one, which was introduced to the rehearsal process early on, creates harsh conditions.

“It gets cold fast, so it’s very uncomfortable,” he said. “The smell of the cardboard with the water is terrible after a while. So it’s very unpleasant, but it does change the perception of your body and of what the movement can be. I like to look at the possibility of movement within different contexts, with different materials even. There’s a moment when I sit in the chair for a long time just looking at the audience and what is dancing is the set.”

BLESSED, Ms. Stuart said, explores how circumstances can change from one minute to the next. “What does it mean to survive?” she asked. “But as much as I go there, I also think of it in terms of form and what this is as an art piece. What is the theatrical experience you can have that’s not shock, that’s not just — O.K. let’s be brutal? There’s an interest in pushing things beyond their comfort zones, but there’s a lot of poetry in this piece. You don’t have to give up one for the other.”

Meg Stuart is an American choreographer and dancer now living in Belgium. She is a very important figure in the European and International contemporary dance world, leading her own company Damaged Goods since 1994. We got the chance to talk to her and the well known Austrian Choreographer and Dancer Philipp Gehmacher together with the German visual artist Vladimir Miller about their new, physically intense piece the fault lines which they presented via Tanzquartier Wien in the MUMOK factory basement on 4th and 5th February 2011.

How did this collaboration come together, what does your work as a trio look like?
Vladimir Miller: I was invited to work together with Meg and Philipp who have previously done a piece called Maybe Forever, also with a third person on stage, a Belgian musician. So it is a continuation of this kind of praxis, bringing a third person - in addition to the two dancers - on stage.
Philipp Gehmacher: We have worked with different artists like scenografists or artists specialised in video before.

Meg Stuart: We made this piece Maybe Forever and we were touring it. It is now four years old. Then it felt there is still another piece with more intimate body dialogue to be made ... so there was something more to do. Few years ago we had a short residency in Salzburg. At that time we invited Vladimir and started to research.

PG: I think it is really a piece that came out of a meeting. Getting together in the same space, each of us proposing ideas and throwing them in there from our own pratice. It was not that kind of work with a score conceived. The gathering came out of a shared interest to meet and spent time together.

MS: We had this growing artistic concerns about putting the work into an art context. It was interesting for us to not just do a performance on stage but to work on something more like a performance installation.

PG: Coming from the performing arts doing a show together that one has to install and reinstall in different places and different buildings which is logistically not always so easy was really an interest of mine. That you can play on site. That doesn’t mean it is site-specific but you have real walls to deal with. It’s not a bare theater but it can become a bare space. You get into the white cube situation because of the video projection that has to work, but it would also work when white walls are rebuilt for us. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be the classical white cube context either.

The concept of space and void seems important for your works. How do you try to fill the void or produce void?
PG: I think in my work I have done a lot of pieces where I have stripped the theater stage sort of bare of all the theater paraphernalia like the curtain and everything: just a bare floor and walls to attain emptiness or void. Then questions pop up like: How to reinstantiate or instantiate movement, physical communication, physical states and physical interaction? With a visual artist like Vladimir coming in through projection, light and all kinds of media it doesn’t necessarily become a straight forward background that illustrates the hole space for a particular theme or aim. In the fault lines the input of Vladimir adds to a certain empty space in a very subtle way.

MS: We are exploring »stills« over many years. Especially in Maybe Forever we have done this »sculptural stills«. In the fault lines there is Vladimir manipulating and flickering light with this very expose means. He is proposing thought processes, questions on all different levels that are not necessarily revealed but are suggested. Not through movement but with projections and drawings.

How do you feel about using spoken words? How does it go along with the movement? How do you work with that in general?

MS: Somehow for me it is always – even if there is language involved – a dance proposal. Even if I am working with language I am still working on moving the discourse of dance or »dance as«. Where does language fail, where does movement stop or become interior or how is it exposed? A lot of our work is about stating things that are not explicit and easily readable.

What about the title of your new performance installation the fault lines?
MS: There is an undisclosed situation that is somehow re-examined and re-constructed. There are gaps in relationship to memory and information, in being too close to it whereas there is a need for a distance. On another level there are the lines between the video projection, the drawing, the hidden connections to life. There is no save territory, something could happen at any moment. It is something you presage but don’t experience at the moment. It is quite dangerous to build something on a »fault line«.

How important is theoretical research in general? Do you have to generate a certain amount of information before you start to work on something?
MS: It is different for everyone of us. We didn’t do a big sort of conceptual preparation for this work. We are working individually on obsessions, expressions ... interests, discoveries on all levels ... and then we bring it all to the studio.

PG: I think we all read a fair amount and have a large interest in theory. I like it when I work by myself. I don’t need a theoretical starting point or an academic research. I try to work as intuitively as I can at the moment, I try to push this process. I think it is important to say we all have our own histories but also know each others histories. I have seen Meg’s work since 1996. I know more or less 80 % of her works. Every time I look at her on stage – I know when a new movement appears that I like, that catches my eye. She also knows what I am up to. We do come with a whole load of stuff that we want to continue with, we know the discourses around our works. Partly we can try to leave it behind. It is a mix of both things: trying to find something new on the one side and trying to go on on the other side. We know what the other person stands for. All that comes into play when you work with someone you are interested in, you like for certain abilities: You maybe even want to push someone into a certain direction or you suggest they could do something they have not done before. That is very different than being more on the directors side and having performers to cope and collaborate, where you have to be more strictly direct.

How important is the architectual space you are performing in? Is it a kind of restriction?
PG: I don’t think it is a restriction. We just have to adapt every time.

VM: It is important for practical reasons. The projections need specific distances to the wall, they need specific lighting situations, specific wall colours. They need the architecture to be possible. We have to situate ourselves precisely in the space.

Why did you choose the MUMOK Factory for the fault lines and not a typical theatre space?
PG: Initiately it was because we wanted to make something intimate. We needed white walls for the projections because the black box theatre wouldn’t work for that. The beauty of the work is that it opened up a paradox situation. We found it interesting to be in a white cube setting, but at the same time we needed a wooden floor because we created a very physical scene that we could not do on concrete. The white cube frames the theatricality of this dance piece in a good way.

VM: I think there is a shared interest to continue exposing this spill over of dance and visual art to confront ourselves with this particularities of viewing. To see a different take on basic constructions like dramaturgy, to see a different culture of perception.

MS: It is an art space, a white cube but it is also a real room. Looking at the gallery as a room: It is a real place, even though it is neutral, where things are projected in to, on to it. We didn’t want a constructed, fake white cube in a theater space.

PG: Black box theater often doesn’t allow you to use its walls because there is a lot of technical stuff tucked away. It is much more like a podium. The focus goes to the centre of the stage whereas here we want to focus on and use the periphery. We appreciate the possibility to deal with the real architectural boundaries.

When New Orleans-born, Berlin-based choreographer Meg Stuart walks into a crowded room her presence ricochets against the walls penetrating the bystanders. The stakes are at once raised and there is a a sudden palpable energy in the space. She is 40-something, tiny and compact, around 5’2” with a slender, muscular build, strong handsome features and thin blondish hair that flops over her forehead in multiple directions. She is quiet and unobtrusive and yet her intense observation of the people around her puts them all figuratively onstage. Each small gesture is magnified, the subtleties of posture identified, each word spoken has the weight of theatrical dialogue. Immediately everyone wants to impress, be at his or her smartest, hippest, coolest. Stuart doesn’t seem to notice the effect she is having. She is actually rather shy and her quiet penetrating gaze is more defensive than offensive. Lucky for the world that Stuart feels kind of uncomfortable at parties. Her refuge in observation transfers to her strategy in creation. She puts life on stage: exposed, abstracted and carefully crafted. In her own words, she looks to “portray people by reinforcing and encouraging qualities already present.” In her last group work, Do Animals Cry, Stuart explored the creepy, beautiful, and complicated world of the family where lessons were taught, love was given and withheld, and family members experienced panting reunions and frequent alienation. It was at once recognizable and surreal, dramatic and monotonous, funny and deeply saddening. Stuart has been creating work in Europe since 1991 when she became the surprise darling of the European contemporary dance scene with her first full-length production Disfigure Study. Over the years since she has created over sixteen productions, collaborated in numerous projects (with Benoit Lechambre, Philipp Gehmacher and Jeremy Wade to name a few), created the improvisational series Crash Landing and Auf Den Tisch! and has had an incredible impact on the way contemporary dancers, choreographers and scholars train, create, perform and speak about dance.

One on one Meg is not the intimidating person she appears to be in public. Rather she is warm and open, curious and kind-hearted. She oscillates between a quiet familial existence and a life on the road—performing and directing, touring cities around Europe and elsewhere, hosting conferences, occasionally teaching and last year working on a book created with editor Jeroen Peeters on her own creative process and history titled Are We Here Yet. It was within the book project that I got to know Meg. After I took a workshop with her in the summer of 2009 she hired me to help her edit and clarify her statements taken from interviews with Peeters. For four months we worked in Berlin, Brussels and the US, sometimes via Skype, both of us on computers gazing at the same Google document, discussing her ideas back and forth, laughing a lot, groaning when we realized we had spent the last hour on one sentence. It’s been almost six months since our work together ended and I’m excited to re-connect with her this July when she comes to SF to teach a workshop at Kunst Stoff Arts. I recently interviewed Meg via skype and a brief excerpt of our conversation follows.

Do you think that having the book finished and out in the world has affected your artistic process?Meg Stuart: Recently I read something like, “Once things are too articulated it disrupts the organic whole.” I feel a little bit like the book has a little bit disrupted me.

Are you feeling like your methods have become almost a science—like the rules are too clear or solid?
In a way, and because, for example, I said in the book “I never make dances to music,” I think, what if I took on that task? Now I have an obsession with making a dance to total over-the-top music like Beethoven’s Ninth. Not do it the Anne Teresa [De Keersmaeker] way but rather from a very personal place. Perhaps have someone come out with that huge music and just be sort of shy and maybe friendly to the audience. Instead of trying to dance the music just taking it as a “wow, here we are in this moment, like I don’t know, should we celebrate this moment or...?” I don’t really feel close to touching that topic right now and yet it’s there somewhere. It’s on my agenda so I don’t give it up.

I am curious about the origin of your ideas. You talk about “image first” in the creative process, but can you trace when those images or ideas come? In the studio or in every day life?
Good question! I wish I knew. I guess we all would like that right? Where’s the hook up? How do you get there? I think I’m really flexible in the back of my mind in terms of taking any source. A lot of us have really great ideas, we just don’t honor them by acknowledging them and pushing them forward. It’s kind of like they pass through us. I tune myself to pay attention and I try to stay receptive to those ideas and keep them present. Sometimes it’s really concrete, like with shaking in Alibi—it just came into my mind. I want the dancers to shake in this piece. The willingness to let it come from all sides is the key. I feel like whatever speaks to you, like an image or a movement, also speaks about you. There’s a reason that you like it or that it has impact. It says something about your own internal state of mind. I always feel so grateful when I like something or feel really moved. I try to take mental notes of those moments.

In your opinion, what is important in a dancer's education? How do you approach teaching?
I often talk about expanding the range, a willingness to jump into the unknown. Dancers must be free enough in their mind and body that they are available for risk, for failure. It can be about a physical readiness—a released body for example. Or it can be about a mental or emotional readiness—a lack of fear or stubbornness, a willingness to be embarrassed. In my workshops I use scores and exercises I’ve developed over years to take people on trips. Some are about entering a fiction such as “Imagine you’re dead” and some are about disruption and commitment, like “Change” in which I ask the students to change physical or emotional states abruptly on command. Some are somewhere in between like “Impossible Tasks” in which I ask the dancers to do things they cannot do such as “be in two places at once” or “disappear.” I am continually responding to the moment and the group. I improvise as they improvise. I have to be quick to respond and identify material and encourage a deeper investigation or development. I accompany the dancers in their work.

Sonia Reiter is a dancer, writer, and dance and Yoga teacher.

Originally published by Dancers’ Group in the July/August 2010 issue of In Dance. www.dancersgroup.org

Meg Stuart answers the phone in Berlin with a series of tiny moans. To be true, she is juggling a lot; her newest work, Do Animals Cry —loosely based on family structures—premiered in April and is currently touring Europe. She is also overseeing the publication of a book, Are we here yet?, about her company, Damaged Goods, which will be available early next year (she describes it as “manual of how to be Damaged Goods”). Beginning November 6, she will appear at the Baryshnikov Arts Center for the U.S. premiere of Auf den Tisch! (At the Table!). The improvisation project, curated by Stuart and copresented by the Performa ’09 biennial, features a conference table, an audience, and a group of carefully selected artists, musicians, actors and thinkers. Joining Stuart for the New York installment are Trajal Harrell, Keith Hennessy, Janez Jansa, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, Jan Maertens, Yvonne Meier, Anja Müller, Vania Rovisco, Hahn Rowe, George Emilio Sanchez and David Thomson. The American choreographer, who has lived in Europe since the ’90s, spoke about improvisation.

We need to talk about At the Table!
Oh. Something that can’t be talked about. [Laughs]

I was worried you were going to say something like that.
But we can try. I am, like, shaking in my boots about it. In the ’90s, I curated this Crash Landing project with David Hernandez and Christine De Smedt, where we all improvised together, and some years later I got asked to do it again. The setup is a big table that the audience and performers are sitting around. There are four microphones. Loosely, it’s a conference about improvisation while people improvise. Basically, what I like about the thing is that there’s a real fluidity between talking and doing. You can walk through all different kinds of voicing—from talking and personal reflection to a speech; you can be talking, and all of a sudden you can become an object or an example. And the audience is kind of flush against the table so they’re really part of the action itself.

What is the meaning of the title?Auf den Tisch, in German, is to put things on the table. What do you have to put out there? [Laughs] The setup is beautiful because you can be very minimal; you just see somebody ask a question, and then any little movement is highlighted. But, of course, to do an improvisation on this big scale in a festival is totally terrifying. I was kind of hoping to put another little small solo next to it. But because of finances, spaces and whatever, only this table project made it. But I’ve stopped crying about it. I’m up for the risk.

What are some of the ideas in it?
It’s an improv that can also reflect on itself. If you think about improv more openly, all the issues that we experience in life are there in a very heightened way. We can talk about taking risks and what we’re afraid of—for me, improv is crisis. And trust. And finding solutions to unstable situations. Or can improvisation be strategy? Without always using the word improv, there is subject matter in it already, So people talk about that or physicalize that and you can fluidly go from associative speech, to wordplay, to just, “Hey, how are you doing?” to dancing-—let it rip and jump around all over the table. And I don’t know how it’s going to play out! I’ve asked a diverse group and we’re all going to have a proposal at the first meeting. They will all bring [an improvisation] score or say that they want to give a speech. Generosity’s important. And compassion. But what I like is that people have to work things out—they have to come to agreements and it’s intense. It’s good.

Where have you done it?
Twice in Belgium, and once in Austria and Berlin. That’s it. This is, like, the fifth edition.

Does it change?
In Vienna, it was in the context of this Mozart festival—I mean “Mozarteum”-—and they got me to do it because they said Mozart used to improvise. [Cracks up] So we had an opera singer on the table and Hooman Sharifi—it was pretty bizarre. And it was in a classical setting, but it broke right open because the first thing someone said was, “Let’s think about Fitzcarraldo—like doing an opera in the jungle!” I know. It’s pretty woo! What I’m happy about is I’ve done a lot of improv research. I still feel like I’m learning how to do it and also how to guide it. I would be very sad if this was presented as “Meg Stuart’s new piece.” Basically I asked Trajal to help collect a group, and then I propose the setup, the scenario, and we go.

Who are some of the participants?
Keith Hennessy, who I met this summer. He’s quite a politically active–type guy, older. And Yvonne Meier, who I once took a class with, like a hundred million years ago, so I’m totally excited because she has so many strong ideas about scoring. Vania Rovisco who actually does a lot of installations and improv work, but she’s part of a younger generation. She danced with me for five years. I’m totally excited that she’s going to be introduced to New York because no one knows her. And another strong woman named Anja Müller—nobody knows her either. She’s a choreographer and performer and a great actress as well. And George Emilio Sanchez—I don’t know him at all [Laughs]. David Thomson, he’s a gorgeous dancer and I’ve never had a chance to cross his path so I find that a total thrill. I think it’s a mix of people that would connect, but aren’t, like, a cozy group—it’s not people who always work together.

So you’ll meet with everyone a few days before the opening?
I’ll be there already from Monday; we meet Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and the show is Friday. We have time. It’s also what I like to do. I don’t like the sort of one-night improv things.

And you discuss scores?
For sure. And I think what’s important is that it’s an improv that works in this particular setting. It’s not just “Let’s go and improvise”—it’s more like we’re all sitting together. What does it mean to have four microphones and be able to ask each other questions and then let it slip into movement?

The audience never becomes involved, right?
They can. It’s not forcing anything, but they have, at times, been asked questions or interviewed—I wouldn’t rule that out. One time we took all the chairs and put them on the table and there was nowhere for the audience to sit. We’re not roping them up and teaching them how to move or something, but the proximity can’t be really denied.

Why do you return to improv?
I use it as a research for my work and I like putting it all in a performance situation, but I think I’m also interested in how to create conditions for something to happen. Years ago, I would meet people in passing at festivals; this is a meeting onstage. It’s another way of connecting—not just, “What do you do?” but sharing practice. I’m always experimenting with forms. I like that this is not just any improv, but a very concrete thing. The safety valve of this project is that anyone can get on the mike and say, “Restart.” There are a lot of other buttons here—other things can happen here because we have this verbal layer. It’s an interesting setup, let’s put it that way.

Does the space change the context?
I think the composition of people does, for sure. What I really like is that talking can blur and you can have parallel realities. People can keep a very intimate conversation and talk really quietly while somebody’s dancing on a table. That’s what I like in improv. I have a wide palate. I’m quite open to things shifting a lot. But there was one table event in Berlin that I wasn’t happy with. I actually made everyone stop, and then they had to do the whole hour and a half again.

Wow.
I know. [Laughs] I think control freaks are the true improvisers.
And too much generosity is boring.
Somehow. But I think you can also call it instant performance. Not just improvising. It’s like collecting shared interests. We’re talking about improv, and that is very difficult to describe. What does it mean to deal with accidents and unstable structures? If I start talking about failure in improv, it can get very deep. It can be really exciting.

Why is this so scary?
Of course, I like to put myself in dangerous situations where I don’t know where I’m going to land. I’ve had my highest performance moments and my lowest in improv situations and it’s a practice. At this moment in New York, I think people appreciate how brave it is to improvise and what it means and how it’s only in this moment at this time with these people and within this context. I hope we can be committed to stretching; I hope that in all our skills we can really put something strong on the line. I will encourage the group. But it’s not my group—it’s a very unique collection of people meeting at this intersection of time and space in the city. In a festival context, when you’re next to finished work, it’s a little bit scary. You just have to have the right lens. It doesn’t mean it can’t be really strong.

Are there rules? Is there anything that the improvisers can’t do?
Uh, uh, uh… [She bursts into laughter.] I guess that means no.

Can you tell me a little about how you came up with the concept for the piece?

I started with family but not necessarily family as we know it, rather the word familiar: intimate spaces, private spaces, the attraction of people close to us. I was curious to compose a group that would change roles. They would have tendencies, one person could be mothering or childish or whatever. That evolved, they wouldn’t be fixed but shifting roles. I knew I would have a closed group but also an ‘outsider’ that would effect the group or change things.

Like a social experiment on stage?

I’ve been interested in social choreography for a long time, the unspoken rules of relationships and how that effects the body. Like when you’re going to greet people, do you kiss them or hug them? Also I found it very exciting to work with the notion of family, a close knit group, but without having to tell a set story.

What methods do you engage with in the studio in order to set your material? It seems to be highly choreographed but still retain a freshness.

For the most part I propose very open situational scores and we improvise daily, sometimes with a task and sometimes I just ask questions. Sometimes it’s more open: I can ask them to pant and see what happens…or I ask them to work on exaggerated motions and I put on music. I often improvise and then we learn segments of the material back from video. I would say to them something like, ‘I want to make a family portrait’ and I work on this concept and all variations of this. Then when I’m ready and I know how the theme will develop, I have them learn fragments of it from video. So for the most part it comes from them and I sort of encourage them along. Of course I like the real time things that are happening now, when it looks like they’re working things out and when they’re questioning themselves during the performance.

I think that integrity in performance was really clear, especially during some of the solos…I wondered how much of those particular parts are left open to the performer? Is that movement in any way improvised?

For Adam’s solo (the outsider) I identify a quality in a character, almost character traits in him: he’s young, sexually adolescent and overwhelmed with emotion. We describe a kind of portrait and then I identify movement material before deciding, ‘I think you should do a solo’. I set up a situation and then slowly it develops… he gave a lot of input but by the end it becomes fixed.

It sounds like the dancers very much play a part in the creative process and I wondered how long you have worked with that particular group?

Half of the dancers I worked with on other pieces before and half of them are new. I have preparation workshops, I try out ideas but I’m also looking for dancers. I think it’s important that there is the right balance of energies depending on what work it is, but mainly that they’re all individual so they can work together as a collective - as a whole. They should be very technical but also able to improvise, have a lot of imagination and be open for experimentation.

Who would you say your influences are?

For this particular piece we watched a lot of movies together in the studio: ‘Festen’, ‘American Beauty’, ‘Teorema’ by Pasolini, ‘Happiness’ by Solondz plus a lot of other independent movies. We also looked at Caravaggio’s paintings. In the piece we have these family portraits at the table and I wanted some sort of classical element to the work. I think I draw from a lot of different sources and then I filter them through into the process.

There was a lot of sound coming from the performers in the piece either through their own voice or by creating sound, like when the ‘mother’ character is bashing on the drum kit.

I try to expand the notion of dance, dancing and choreography. So they can breath, they can sing, they can scream, they can dance. I’m not limiting it to one kind of way of presence or vocabulary. They shift a lot, their style is always changing. It’s about expanding the range.

There seemed to be a lot of space within the work, this idea of waiting for the right moment, and I wondered how deliberately you feel you are manipulating the audience’s perception of time and their awareness of place?

I mean I normally work with a flow of time, or extended time, that’s typical for me. I think this ‘everydayness’ or waiting…..It’s not always about the event, but also sticking together in hard times. It’s about the daily times, almost the boredom of things. Like meeting each other at the kitchen table. I wanted to play this out somehow. I think theatre is a place where you can take time, you have a different notion of time. I know I challenge the audience but I think it pays off in the end.

The set design by Doris Dziersk and music by Hahn Rowe seemed totally integral to the work, seamlessly fused into the body of the piece. How did you approach working with these elements?

The composer wasn’t always there because he was in NY but he was involved from the start and was making music right up till the last moment. The stage was built really early on it the process. Not at the very beginning but we started rehearsing, had a deadline and it had to be made. We wanted to make something vast, animal, cosy and bright but also something that suggested there’s no way out, that you hide secrets in this tunnel.

It looked to me like a beaver’s house. One moment that stood out was when the performers were running through the tunnel. Just seeing the different layers, the textures as the light changed. What is your approach to working with those materials?

The running is important because it addresses the stage directly, a way of trying to make sense of the space. There is a house or a safe place, but it’s a dog house and it’s way too small. There aren’t a lot of elements, but it’s enough to give it a sense of home. A home gone wrong or something.

What’s the life span of the work? Are you coming to the UK?

I would love to! You know I haven’t shown my work much there. We’re going to Canada in February and we’ll be in Belgium and Holland. We’ll be keeping it for a while.

Meg Stuart returns to DTW with another duet about love and loss - this time, opposite Philipp Gehmacher.

During her last visit to New York nearly two years ago, Meg Stuart performed a duet with the Canadian dancer and choreographer Benoit Lachambre, Forgeries, Love and Other Matters, at Dance Theater Workshop. Never mind that after F01'geries she created at least three other dances, including It's not funny, a group comedy; Blessed, a political solo; and Maybe Forever, a melancholy duet with the Austrian choreographer Philipp Gehmacher, which will grace DTW next week.
"It's weird that it goes from one duet to the next," Stuart reflects in a telephone interview from Berlin, where she resides. "But whatever. The only thing you can say is that it's another collaboration with another choreographer. Maybe it's still about love and loss, but Philipp and Benoit are totally different. The atmosphere is totally different too."

And Americans have missed so much of Stuart's work since she relocated to Europe in the mid '90s that it's hard to be picky. Unlike Forgeries, a cinematic work set on a mountainous terrain of shaggy brown carpet - a comedy of manners shaded by catastrophe and science fiction - Maybe Forever is stripped down. The tender, melancholic piece, which embraces themes of disconnection and separation, is a portrait of lost love, where movement, more than theatrics or text, is of overriding importance. While intimate, the production is hardly plain; in addition to Janina Audick’s set-somewhat reminiscent of a concert hall - Maybe Forever also features the Brussels-based singer and songwriter Niko Hafkenscheid, who will perform his ballads alongside the dancers.

"The work is really sculptural, and as much movement as there is, there is also stillness," Stuart says. "There's a painful quiet within the movement itself. It's not like, 'Oh, I want you to be there!’ There's not a struggle; there's an acceptance of absence in this shifting relationship we have with each other. It's really the about the gesture and the phantom pain we experience in relationships. Or all the ghosts we bring with us when we meet someone else."

But Maybe Forever, which flips back and forth through time, also reveals much about the connection between Stuart and Gehmacher, an established European choreographer who will ne making his New York debut at DTW. The pair met at a workshop taught by Stuart in 1996. On the surface, they have little in common-Stuart deals with theatrical concerns, Gehmacher with formal ones - but their performing chemistry is legendary. "For me, this is very much about the joy of being onstage with another strong individual," Gehmacher says. "That was one of the reasons I really wanted to do this piece - it allowed me to be challenged in a different way than when I work with my dancers. So on different levels, I feel this chemistry, and I understand more and more what she is about. For me, the strongest quaIity about her performance is that she hovers between absence and presence all the time. Why she embodies or enacts certain things in a certain way, and if it's a place where I feel like I should join her, I try. Chemistry is all exchange in a way."

Stuart is curious for audiences in New York to see Maybe Forever because of the way it focuses on the gesture and minute movement-her fascination with what the body can say by itself, without affectation. "I feel like the roots for that have been laid out in the States, and certainly in New York," she says. "There's something quite clean about the work. Forgeries was so messy in so many good ways, you know? Everything was spilling, and here you just see every little glance and detail." In Maybe Forever, she is influenced by Gehmacher, who is known for creating rigorous dances with few movements; for all its severity, Stuart finds his work touching. "I remember watching a performance a couple of years ago, and I thought, I want to be in there," she recalls. "I think this is a return to a trust in movement, a return to a kind of simplicity. Looking atone single gesture on an empty stage-I wanted to do that."

New York, Brussels, Zurich and Berlin have been the stations of your career. Add to that the fact that you moved 27 times before your 27th birthday within the United States alone. How has that affected your work? Do places influence your art?
Sure. On the other hand, it always amazes me how much of my inner world I take with me. Of course, another studio, alone the route to get there through the respective city streets - I feel affected by that. Just as it heightens my appreciation of my own needs and desires. I have my interests, my questions, my obsessions. They are not connected to one place. I think that the idea of always being on the road, having just arrived, getting ready to go again - this kind of displacement has always appealed to me.

Apart from that, I have always been interested in Berlin as a city. My guest performance of Disfigure Study in 1992 was, as far as I know, the first dance performance done at Podewil. I remember how I ran through the streets. It rained. I observed the people from a distance. I could feel the energy. I was very moved. The people here are very direct, almost as if they are looking for conflict. That is hard, but also refreshing. You get to the point fast.

You were born in New Orleans. What do you remember about the city? And where in the USA did you live before going to college in New York to study dance?My birthplace was flooded by Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005. The house was washed away, or so I was told. What do I remember from back then? Well, I remember a hurricane. And a Mardi Gras parade. My father was working on his Ph.D. at the University. I was still very young. My parents got divorced when I was seven years old; later I lived with my mother in Los Angeles. She taught at the California Institute of the Arts. We lived in a house in an open community of artists, and there was somehow no question that she would take me with her to several courses that she taught. Film, theater, fine art, dance, it was all already a part of my life. San Francisco was another station. And then I went to Boston. A different lifestyle, a different way of thinking, more open in any case. I started to become interested in foreign films; I dipped into a kind of subculture.

Were you already dancing at that point?
I started with ballet around the age of six; at the same time I was also becoming familiar with character dance. I liked that. Later modern dance became my focus. But ballet always belonged to my idea of dance and what it meant to be a dancer. Then, at some point, I started running and training
for middle-distance races.

How do you develop your movement vocabulary? Does that also have something to do with daily life in the city?
I just love watching people, in every imaginable sense. When people don't know what they should do with their hands, or when two people meet and are at odds whether to greet each other with one, two or three kisses. These kinds of irritations inspire me - on a 'microscopic' level. On a higher level it's phenomenon like: what, for instance, starts a trend? Life-changing events. Current events. Or the way in which the media overplay our emotions; how our wants and interests are, at times, determined by photographs alone. A work often starts with an animated image. It takes on its own qualities and possibilities, but is otherwise quite simple.

Could you describe that with an example?
With REPLACEMENT, for example, it was an installation from Bruce Nauman: A boy beats a drum, and a mouse runs through a labyrinth. It is about the relationship between the two. That is the image I held in my mind as I thought about the new piece. I wanted to install a laboratory together with my dancers and workers, and in the process was thinking about an experiment, an experiment on people. Theater as an experiment. We started by grappling with the idea of the body of the future. What could that be? As far as
genetics is concerned, cyborgs, monstrosity. Based on that, the piece developed over an eight-month period. The word 'replacement' is the key. I see the piece revolving around that concept of replacement, as well as the fear that is tied into that. The fear of losing your job alone, as people are replaced with technology. And then there is the replacement or removal through a new generation, through history. Or the change to a new city. You have to adjust to a new culture and new surroundings. And then there is the scene where a woman starts to chase her own video image. It is meant to be a little ironic, to imagine being replaced by a video. But I think you can stretch it to cover theater as a whole: we are meanwhile used to seeing medieval pictures. What more can the theater do? What is the theater replacing? And how can the theater compete or even deal with the media?

The concept of control seems to suggest itself. To have a position under control, to lose the control - doesn't this notion play a general role in your work?
That's true. The idea of control has always fascinated me. A tricky matter however when it is a question of movement. I force the body to the edge of the loss of control, although, we do rehearse it for a long time beforehand. The result is a highly brilliant 'romp out of control.' I am interested in physical states that cannot be controlled. Shaking, fever, sweating, ticks, movements that we cannot hide. Apart from that, I also think about the power and control in relationships between people, which I then play out in
physical scenes. The situation in REPLACEMENT is obvious because there is a stage on the stage. An experimental arrangement. People on the outside observe and control the people on the inside. But in the course of the piece, the room explodes, the arrangement shifts. At some point you no longer know who is watching whom. There is no safe place any more. On the other side is an open and democratic room.

Isn't it a kind of Matrix, with the idea that everything is just an illusion and in the end a higher power controls everything?
I think we do touch on that idea; we flirt with it.

REPLACEMENT simulates an experiment on people, an interference with nature. Do you also have images of man-made disasters and catastrophes possibly in mind, whose images we are confronted with day in and day out? Environmental disasters, or even wars, and the fears and dread attached to them?
To be consistent, yes. I think that when we talk about these kinds of fears, it always means that we are confronted with death. Relatives die, family structures dissolve. These are all side-effects of our surrounding circumstances. I don't think that I propose a catastrophe so much as a modern Frankenstein scenario. We looked closely at the history of human experimentation, and the monstrosity of the science industry, with their partly inconsistent statements, from all sides. On one level, the horror should have been presented as realistically as possible - which is why the video images play a partly superficial role here. There is a lot of fiction included, but when you think about the concept of hybrids being part human and part animal, or even that we are able to put the aging process on hold, you start to question the possibilities. How far do we want to go? Do we seriously want to interfere with evolution?

Do you see your choreography in a particular tradition?
I can't really say. I don't think it is my job to assign myself to a certain frame or tradition. I know that I am of the second generation of Trisha-Brown-American-Dance-Release-Technical-Tradition, but I am actually totally fascinated with theater, which is why I am constantly searching for meaning in movement.

What does the phrase 'dance theater' mean to you? Especially now while working in Germany?
I think about Pina Bausch; she is definitely one of my heroines. Plus she has had a huge influence on my work and the direction that my work has taken, once I saw her for the first time, that is. However, I would not really considered myself to be a 'dance theater' choreographer. I would say that everything I do is dance. I put the dance under pressure and force a confrontation with other media. It is something that has happened over many years in a discourse with fine art. Paintings were and still are very important to me, but I have chosen the theatrical stage. In the context of the structures I have been working on over the past few years, at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich and the Volksbuhne, my work is now in a discourse with the story of the theater.

More so than your time in Brussels?
Theater interests me. And where theater cannot reach, dance begins. I am especially interested in working with actors, performers who move between dancing and acting. It is a different process. I still cannot get used to the idea of working from a script or text. That is far away. I don't know if it will ever come to that. My work is constantly developing. I still experiment and play around with form. We'll see how far I can stretch and draw out the dance.

Up until now, Disfigure Study is the only piece that you have taken up again. How do you see the piece 15 years later?
Oh gosh! It is somehow so rebellious and difficult. It is so severe and full of rejection. I feel much more open today; my work is much more open. The look at the body is really forced into new channels in this piece. The steering of our attention, observing others and ourselves, surveillance, even through the camera lens, have remained central themes of your work. I think a continuous motif in my work is the theme of exposure. Here exposure is about the unveiling and displaying of relationships in contact
with others. This kind of questioning keeps me busy. It is often about a love-hate story. I flirt with it, distort it. The theme of identity is also touched upon. However fragmented it all may seem. And that always has
something to do with observing situations. How we see ourselves. What picture we have construed of ourselves. And what of that we are willing to reveal.

Would you consider your approach to be psychological? Are you interested in psychoanalytical questions?
Sometimes yes. Shift in awareness and the distortion of perception do interest me. It gets me thinking, anyway.Loss is a central theme. Relationships are, for me, first and foremost, about distance, about the ghost that hovers. A reminder of something that is over and done with. And sometimes you still have the longing.

What exactly characterize the obsessions that affect you?
It is the pictures that always come up again and again. Images of bodies that have to recover, or of foreign creatures that make it into a house where they don't belong. And then there is a dream that I had as a kid: I am in a film with my family and friends that is being shown in an empty theater. And suddenly I have the desire to climb down from the screen to watch myself.

Are you working on a specific language or style?
I am actually trying not to get stuck in one specific language or style. My intent was and still is to reassess the language for each respective piece. For example, 'ALIBI' came into being in the style of sport, but it should look more casual and not stylized. Sure there are established connections throughout all of my work. But I have not defined the one way to be present on the stage. Voice, trembling, walking - it can be anything.

You talked about the inspiration of fine art. In 1997 you were even invited to Documenta X in Kassel with 'Splayed Mind Out' created in collaboration with the American video artist Gary Hill. What was most special for you on that work?
My collaboration with Gary Hill made me work very abstractly and seemingly reduced, more or less to go from gesture to gesture. It became a very airtight piece, in contrast with the subsequent work, 'appetite' with artist Ann Hamilton, which was much more physical, more open, and clearly theatrical Ð one of the most intensive collaborations I had had up to that point. The piece had the character of an installation. At one point a projection of a huge face passes over the back wall of the stage, while two dancers are making minimal gestures. The presence of the video became actual action, and the dancers became the installation. A kind of reversal takes place. Of course, it was wonderful to be invited to Documenta. I felt very honored. Most of all it was exciting to see the artists busy with preparations just days before the opening. I was not 100 percent satisfied as far as my contribution was concerned. I was just about to finish with Splayed Mind Out and was therefore not in the position to prepare something special for the occasion. I also wanted to do a small sample of my work with Gary Hill. But to see that kind of work at 1:30am at the end of a course and a long day of exhibits is difficult. The context was not perfect. Apart from that, I do enjoy showing my work in museums. I like the crossover, the resonance not only of a dance audience, but of a contemporary art scene as well.

Hahn Rowe and Paul Lempe are composers with whom you have worked repeatedly. Music certainly acts as a device to create atmosphere in your work. How important is music for you on the whole?
Music is important to me. It shouldn't be too dynamic, but still engaging and rhythmically complex. Hahn Rowe is very sensitive to the dancers. At the start of our work together, he simply put on a cassette. Whereas for FORGERIES, LOVE AND OTHER MATTERS he created a suggestive sound and with
that an atmosphere directly on the stage, even though he did not actually personally perform. In 'ALIBI' with Paul Lempe, I wanted a sound that echoes the shudder of the performers so that even the audience would sense the tension within their own bodies.

You take a lot of time for the development and rehearsal of a piece, earlier up to nine months. Is that still the case? Or have you developed a new strategy through the years that speeds up the process?
I have become noticeably more aware of my patterns and my reaction to the process. I can feel the distinct warning signals when a process is too rigid or too open. Yet I do attempt to tackle each project in a new way. I am still experimenting with the process itself. I certainly have more techniques at hand today to stimulate the process in my dancers and bring out the material.

Which techniques?
I give them pictures paired with physical references and instructions. With that I try to bring the dancers into particular postures. I make video recordings that we then watch together and discuss, or I'll work with eyes closed and let the dancers reflect sensuous reactions on a physical level. Reactions to a smell, to a touch.

Improvisation plays an essential role in your work. At one point you spoke of improvisation as life's plan.
Did I say that? That is a considerably passionate matter for me. Group improvisation has always been a part of my work. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how musicians and fine artists can improvise with performance artists and dancers. That is valuable knowledge.

Is the improvisation work that you initiate reflected in your choreography?
I think so yes. Quite a bit of my work strictly adheres to my own decision-making. In comparison, Improvisation is more open, more for the studio, for investigation, in the meantime. Still intuition and the kind of 'stunt' feeling of a free fall are essential elements in my work. I have determined that I like when my work looks improvised, immediate, and natural, and in that way more daring. I want to feel how the dancers discover the moment.

How did the improvisation project Crash Landing together with dancers Christine De Smedt and David Hernandez come about back in 1996?
The idea for the project came about from a wish to establish a deeper bond to certain artists with whom I had always wanted to work. The fulfillment of a dream, you could say, to bring artists of various branches together. It is about the exploration of improvisation as a form of performance. A one-night-stand experience. I was looking for people who were not exclusively settled in the improvisation scene, but for whom improvisation plays a significant role or is incorporated into their work. Vera Mantero for example. 'Crash Landing' started as an experiment in Louvain. The uppermost requirement was working outside of a hierarchy; decisions were made together by everyone.

Do you have a favorite memory of an improvisation session?
1998 in Lisbon. The theme was 'time.' One day we started at 10pm, the next day at 1pm. On the third day, some of the one-hour performances were extended to eight hours (9pm-5am). It was interesting how many shapes and forms the extended performance took on and to experience what performance can be. Occasionally it was like a party or rather is was a party: it was someone's birthday at midnight. Techno music played. And then it resembled a dance performance with solos, duets, and trios. One part of the improvisation made up a kind of installation, another part shifted to the outside. The audience came and went. Many stayed for the whole eight hours. At times nothing happened. The performers wrote letters and messages on a computer, which were projected on the wall. The musicians launched into a song based on one single note. And then, I remember, how David danced a wonderful solo at 4:30 in the morning. Calm, awake and very physical.

Crash Landing is now being replaced by Auf den Tisch!Auf den Tisch! is an improvised conference that is less an improvisation itself so much as a reflection of the improvisation; of the connection between movement and talking about movement; the connection between movement and text. It is an investigation of experiences, of spontaneity and control. A discourse to uncover shared interests. Clips from artistic points of view. It is a direct way to come face to face with others. The presence of an audience ensures a grade of risk.

Recently you have been experimenting with trance techniques. What new insights have opened up for you since then?
I became familiar with the work of Bargus through an acquaintance, a Balinese shaman. It is a form of energy work, a shake meditation that can last up to eight hours. In Alibi I use this imagine to shiver in a trance. An image of energy flowing through the body, crossing borders. I am fascinated with the idea of dancing without a body. It is an inquiry of perceptions. I have no real ties to one specific philosophy or belief. However I do like the idea of healing someone through music and dance. In REPLACEMENT we applied holotrophic breathing techniques - sporadic breathing, panting, hyperventilating, in order to experience various states and memories in the trance.

With REPLACEMENT, your first piece produced in Germany, you were then invited to Tanzplatform Germany in 2006. Do you identify yourself in a kind of national context?
Dance as an art form needs supporters, attention, and respect. When so many people come together who are interested in spreading the art of dance, I am proud to be able to show my art in such a context. As long as it is about choreographers and dancers who live in Germany, and I have the fantastic opportunity to belong, I am proud of that. It is a meeting of great artists. I am not participating in a sporting-event where I play for Belgium, America or Germany. I simply create my art.

Do you feel like an American? An American in Europe?
I feel that my work definitely stands in an European context. I am in a discourse with American choreographers, who, like me, show their work primarily in Europe for financial reasons and because of performance set-up. As well as with choreographers such as Jerome Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Sasha
Waltz. It is a dialogue that surpasses nationality. Of course, I feel the tension and the horror circulating in the United States at the moment. That has an effect on my view of the world. And I address that in my works. Europe, where my work has been supported for the past 15 years, has become a kind of artistic home.

Do you see your work as political in any way?
I would rather not answer that question. The decisions that we make concerning how people treat each other on the stage says a lot. That carries weight. I think my work raises many questions.

In 1995, you definitely took a stand on Arlene Croces's article 'Opferkunst,' on the occasion of Bill T. Jones' piece 'Still/Here,' with your solo XXX for Arlene and Colleagues. That was quite a political act, wouldn't you say?
I simply had to react to it. I found it unbelievable that a critic wrote about a piece that she hadn't even seen, let alone that she could say: 'I do not want to see any piece on that subject.' It shouldn't be the business of the critic in reaction to such contemporary work to downright ignore the artistic relevance, and in so doing to maintain a conservatism that would like to prevent art from being produced, being made available, or posing questions. My work also places an anti-virtuous, unheroic body in the center, and reveals very human efforts and strains. It does not wish to command sympathy, but rather is movement, created as a metaphor for a language, that makes a statement about problems and situations, which the viewer can participate in.

What kind of relationship do you have with the critics?
Critiques are often written in languages that I cannot understand. I make an effort, though, to have them translated. Now and then the view from outside conveys a new understanding. Although, I am only receptive in the first month after the premier, and only in that time do I make any changes. I do not expect everyone to love my work. It is controversial and challenging; I am always looking for risk. I only wish for well-though-out reactions.

Your work is sometimes considered to be depressing and hopeless. And yet, in FORGERIES, LOVE AND OTHER MATTERS, you allow us a glimpse into a sunny future. Does utopia exist for you? What do you believe in?
Hmm- a big question. The first thing that occurs to me is our ability to regenerate, to heal ourselves. I think in FORGERIES, LOVE AND OTHER MATTERS, it is about hope, even when the love story is an illusion. I basically believe that we all play every role, that we are all responsible. There is no 'us' and 'them.' We are all participating; everything is inside of us. What grows out of that is what I would call sympathy.

A theatre is not a playbackspace. It’s a live situation where things can be questioned.

Interview in the frame of Toneelstof, a project mapping theatre history in Flanders starting in the sixties. Meg Stuart has been interviewed by Bart Magnus about the nineties.

How do you look back on the nineties?

It's strange to look back, because you can't separate it from your own history. In 1990 I was twenty-five, so it's different to be in your late twenties than now being in my mid forties. But for me, it was the big transition from working in New York for ten years to showing my first piece in 1991 at the Klapstukfestival. It was the transition of becoming a choreographer and an artist in my own right. There was an extraordinary amount of energy and also a lot of tension. But maybe that is what I see in the decade because of my personal experience.

Did you see any performances of the 'Flemish Wave' like Rosas, Jan Fabre, Wim Vandekeybus when you were in New York?

I heard that things were going on in Belgium and there was an audition for Wim Vandekeybus, but I couldn't imagine leaving New York, so I didn't go. But I was interested in what was going on. There was a performance of Vandekeybus at The Kitchen, but I didn't see it. I remember that, when I showed my first work in Leuven at the festival, Michel Uytterhoeven said to me: 'Unless you have seen Rosas and Jan Fabre, you can't speak about dance or performance in Belgium', and I thought, 'who are they?'

So I went to see Jan Fabre's Sweet Temptations. It didn't really shock me, but it was a strong confrontation. I found the use of elements almost irritating. It was disjointed, strong and powerful. Later on I also saw Ottone Ottone by Rosas. It had a huge influence on me. I found it so accomplished. I was really impressed by it. But I only saw those works. I still haven't seen Fase. And I only saw the reconstruction of Rosas danst Rosas.

The most important performance for me in the nineties still is Moeder & Kind by Alain Platel and Arne Sierens. I found it so human, but with a very sharp lens. Nothing was covered up. Everything was exposed. It was an intimate space of a very dysfunctional family and it was laid out in images. The kids in the piece had an equal voice and an equal say. They expressed themselves through pop music. At the same time it was kind of brutal. I saw it with a bunch of friends in Bruges around Christmas. We had a Christmas party and I thought it was the perfect Christmas show, because it was about family falling apart.

When I started working here, I made No Longer Readymade in residency and had more contact with the artists here. I started to meet different artists and got more into contact with choreographers.

How were your last years in New York? Why did you decide to come to Belgium?

When I was in New York I was always on the run, working two or three jobs, touring and dancing for two or three different companies. It was a good time, because I took in a lot of information. I went to a lot of galleries and I saw many things. But at the same time I felt that there was something that needed to be said. At that moment there were a lot of new body techniques: a lot of work with technique and release. But I guess everyone in New York either wanted to dance with Trisha Brown or was training in that way. I was also training in that way, but I was curious to show something more ruptured, another type of body. I was trying to resist my training. AIDS was also a big topic in New York at that time.

Did it have an influence on the dance scene?

Very concretely, artists were dying. Somehow, there was a sort of dance boom in the eighties in New York with a lot of financial support. A lot of people did dance. It got a bigger audience, but later on things were closing down and there seemed to be less money and less companies. People could do their first piece or second piece, but they could never start up a company that could sustain itself, besides the main companies of Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown. Financially things were shutting down.

That was the beginning of the nineties?

Yes, but there was still a sense of community and a lot of shows to see. In New York there is always a lot going on. It's strange, because 'my' New York was downtown, lower eastside, St Marcus Church. Now the geography has changed. The artistic community has moved outside of the city. Now it's in Williamsburg, deep into Brooklyn and other spaces. So even if I would go back to New York, it would be different. The map has moved. The areas are not the same.

You got to Leuven in 1991. How did you end up at Klapstukfestival|Klapstuk?

Tine Van Aerschot went to New York to look for choreographers and young artists to suggest to Bruno Verbergt and maybe invite to the Klapstukfestival. She saw me dance with another choreographer, Randy Warshaw. She contacted me, and came to the studio to see a work in progress. I happened to come to Europe, so I met Bruno Verbergt and Marc De Putter. They were running Stuc and Klapstuk, and they said: 'Why don't you work for six weeks in the Dance Studio in Leuven?' So I did. They came and saw a small solo that I did in The Kitchen and eventually they asked me to show my first evening piece in the festival.

When we look at the reviews of your first piece, everyone seemed to agree that it was the best piece of Klapstukfestival|Klapstuk 1991. Did you also experience it as something extraordinary?

I felt I got strong reactions. To put out your first piece takes a lot of strength. It's important that your first piece is a strong statement. I don't think it should be otherwise. I was just relieved and happy that it made sense.

One of the critics said that the world at that time, in 1991, needed an artist that was concerned with society and said something about the world. They felt that Disfigure Study could answer that question?

I wouldn't say that. I can only say that it responded to something that was missing, but it was also choreographic research. I didn't show an integrated body moving through space; I showed a body in fragments. It is a resistant body that keeps resisting the will of the tour. I show small studies, things cut up. There is a lot of disconnection. I was really proposing this distortion as a physical concept. In a way it was about exposing an interior violence. It was still dance, but starting from the question how we can read movement as it develops.

The disfigurement and dislocation of the body seems related to the dislocated or disconnected world. Or at least it was read like that. Was that intended or were you just concerned with how this body was put on stage?

Of course you were absorbing reality. You absorb where you are, you take in where something is made. It was made in Leuven, but it was also made in New York, so it responds to that. Any artist, who is open and sensitive, responds to their world and how they see it. It's quite a sober work. It's interesting that it had a connection with audiences here in Flanders or audiences at that moment in Belgium. It resonated with the artistic landscape. Half a year later we showed it in Holland, in Springdance, and we got very bad reviews. People were not connected to the work at all.

How do you choose your dancers? Is it a question of technique?

It has developed over time, but they should be technically skilled and able to understand and physically respond to my language and my natural way of moving. I am not interested in working with non-dancers or anybody on the street. There is a certain amount of technique and skill that is needed to release and throw your body on the floor. I like dancers that have experience with contact improvisation. I look for strong improvisers and for performers who can be exposed, transparent and vulnerable on stage, but they don't need a fixed way of presenting themselves. They should have a wide range and should be intelligent movers.

The nineties were a transition period for dance. When I studied dance, you had the masters who had a certain body language and technique, so you learned the style of someone else and interpreted the work that was made. But in the nineties people were looking for new structures, even hybrid structures, and new situations. You looked for new ways to create work, so throughout the nineties dancers became more active participants. They are always active, but more active in terms of how they proposed their ideas, improvisation or scores. The whole politics of collaboration or working together with dancers had to be negotiated. I think things moved in that direction.

Which performance in the nineties was the most important for your development as a choreographer?

It's hard to say, because they're like your children. You can't say: 'That's my favourite.' You can defend the ones that aren't the most successful. You value them even more, because they push you in developing further. You can distinguish certain periods in my work: the first period is my first and second piece, Disfigure Study and No Longer Readymade. That was made in residencies, partly in Glasgow, then in Leuven, and also a bit on the road. It typifies leaving New York and not really arriving in Belgium. It's like living in those in-between spaces and adjusting to a new understanding of me and my work: how I manage my time and who I am. Things were shifting. I think it's about being displaced.

And then I made No One is Watching, which was the first real group piece. That was completely made in Brussels.

Then in the last half of the nineties there was a project about working with visual artists. There was a lot of interest in searching for hybrid forms or new structures, new ways to approach processing. In order to make new work, we had to find new methods of working. We were thinking about how we work and in what way pieces get made, or how they need to be made. These questions really started to surface and instead of starting with the dancers and the movement language, I was interested in starting a dialogue with visual artists. And afterwards meet the dancers through that dialogue and try to work on other ideas. So I looked for artists that I could connect to like Gary Hill for example. I saw his videos and fragmentations of the body: looking at small body parts and creating a body pile in which you don't know who's body is what. It shows a body of catastrophe, when you don't know if they've lost their identity. I got quite obsessed with body piles: the merging of one. That was the faze of working with visual artists and working with Gary and Ann Hamilton. This development was very important.

In 1994 Damaged Goods was founded. What was it like to form your own company in Brussels? What were the conditions in the artistic field in Flanders and how difficult was it to establish your own company?

There was a certain group of people here in Leuven and in Klapstukfestival|Klapstuk who helped with the touring and managing of the first two pieces. Then they said that it would be good to apply for money from the Flemish Community. I guess I was the first non-Flemish choreographer that even tried it. It felt a bit groundbreaking. We decided to try it. We didn't know where we would land, and we didn't know how to develop.

We were rejected once or twice and we weren't recognized as a company immediately, but I did get money for projects, It took a while to get established. For me it's essential that I am not somebody who's just passing by. There has to be a long-term commitment and I have to have time to work all day. It was important that it wasn't something casual, just seeing what would happen next. It was necessary to dig deeper and commit myself to doing research and not feeling like I had to make the next new piece. I could still research and try things out. The company allowed for other types of projects, like Crash Landing. Creating that kind of improvisation project was only possible because of the structure of the company.

Was your work in the nineties, and maybe even now, a reaction to what other dance companies did? You said you gave an answer to something that was missing in dance. What exactly was missing and how did you show that in the use of the body for example?

It's important that the things you show in the theatre space are not simply statements. It's not about showing material and movements that are learnt and just playing them back. It's not a playbackspace. It's a live situation where things can be questioned. That can be about who I am or who I am for the audience, or the relationship between performer and audience, how I experience my body. It's all about asking questions, not just for me but also for each performer involved. Things are not easily resolved. It's not about: 'Look what we can do and look what we have, look what we have trained and learned.' It's about things clashing, things being confronted, things failing, working with resistance, working with an extended period of time. This was very important.

In New York in the eighties everything went very fast and things were rushed. And we thought: 'No! Stop! Slow down, we work with extended time, and you have to look at this. You have to look at this again and again in stretched time until you reflect on this image.' There was a real insistence on slowing things down. Sometimes I would see dance and I would see it flow, but I always thought: 'I don't want to see this, I want to see things disrupted, things getting irritated, stretched, pulled apart, things not flowing.' This was really important and maybe it continues to be important.

One of the critics called the body in your work a deaestheticized body. Can you relate to that description?

You spend years in a studio learning to be distorted or to show disconnected bodies, disjointed limbs, or working with states. I think it's the discovery of working with emotional states. And when you see someone in an intensive state in a way it becomes virtuosic and skilful. I had to convince dancers to do this kind of work, but now if I teach in Paris for example, things go much faster. People have those improvisation skills. It has become a kind of training.

Is there a difference between the atmosphere in the nineties and now?

Now there's more warmth and heart. People are more open. At that time things were more closed. I felt that if my work hurt, it would work.

Maybe it's more difficult to hurt people now, because of all the images they see.

Yes, somehow. We didn't show wild grotesque images just to shock, but there was a lot of internalized tension as a result of what was going on in the world. It was put on the body.

So what was happening in the world was not literally put on stage, but internalized in the body?

Yes, what was happening in the world was internalized. It was trying to digest it. I thought a lot about loss, dealing with loss, dealing with absence, letting go of things, things falling apart, and so on. That's how we worked, how the absence marked our body. We also worked with issues of trauma and working with body memory: how that forms us, and our presence. We started to research all of that and it could only happen because of the research into release and opening and going into virtual spaces as you lie on the floor. Only when the body is open and not in front of a mirror learning movement, when it starts to work in the imaginary space, you can travel back into a body state and body memories. Not just private memories but also collective ones.

Were specific events ever used as an inspiration for your work, like the war in Iraq or Rwanda? Or were you more focused on the body itself?

For me, going more direct with the body started in 2001. But we didn't read or look at specific things.

Was the difference between performance and dance important to you? Is it relevant, because there are different terms like dance-dance and dance-theatre...

It was a search for hybrid forms. The Crash Landing project was very important because improvisation was shown for the first time in Théâtre de la Ville for example. Artists came together in a state of emergency. I talked a lot about improvisation as crisis. We come together and we don't know where we are and we don't know what we are going to make. It's not about shared agreements, but disagreements. We had different kinds of languages that we brought together. We didn't have live musicians working with instruments, but working with electronics. This electronic music was very important. We forced things together and we insisted on finding a new language. But we still wanted to improvise. In this way you can find out how artists can meet and can cross over. It's looking for new ways to collaborate and new ways to create structures where it could be either more like an art piece or more like a concert. For me these issues about dance theatre for example were not that present at that time, it was more about taking information from the visual arts and looking at how we could work together. In Crash Landing bodies were often shrink-wrapped; they were installed. We worked with objects and looked at how we could improvise with certain situations.

It didn't matter if the result was more like dance theatre or performance?

Yes and also we didn't try to create a singular event, or a singular proposal. There was quite a lot of excess. We allowed it to be an instable object, or an instable event that had different readings and different entrances, different ways of interpreting. We changed a lot of things in flux and we changed the space every night. We didn't want to get too comfortable; we didn't want to get fixed on something. We wanted to keep working with instability. If I have to go back and talk about the nineties, I would say that there were a lot of unstable proposals.

What were the most important influences on your work in the nineties, maybe collaborations or things that you saw?

Artists like Nick Cave, but that is in the eighties, PJ Harvey, experimental music. I don't know. It's hard to say.

It wasn't that relevant?

I can say what I was looking at. But it isn't like Francis Bacon or the work of Mike Kelly was an influence. It's hard to say what influenced me. You can name some points, but it is never specific.

You talked about the performance Moeder & Kind, but were there any other performances that you saw that were striking to you? Are there some choreographers you feel related to in Belgium?

I think the early work of Alain Platel was very important. There was Moeder & Kind and then the next one Bernadetje, with the bumper cars. These first works were very striking.

If you look back at the nineties, what is your overall feeling of the decade?

Things were very tense, but there was still a great amount of energy. It was before 9/11. We still believed we could find a new way to make pieces, a new way to improvise structures, and create new understandings of what choreography and performance can be. It's not optimistic at all, but there was room for things to shift and move. We didn't think it had all been said. There was no question about why dance? We were focused on redefining dance and thinking about what we were saying with our movement and dancing.

The individual was important and the person behind the movement. Where is that person and how does he position himself in the world, and how is he related to the world. Where do we put this internal space, thoughts and feelings when we move? How do we embody that? And next to that, how can we embody feeling disconnected or not present? Where does that have a place? It's all about the moments before you move. All the thoughts and questions you have inside your head.

Do you feel something of this openness is lost nowadays?

These things are very fractured and splintered. There is a lot and it's very hard to track, and there are many mini tracks. There are so many different small points of view, but it doesn't feel like things are lost. I think that artists of my generation are more open and there is more generosity and connections between the artists.

Cristiane: I would like to start by asking you to talk about the improvisational score and more specifically about how you establish the sequence of the improvisation. How do you work on that structure?

Meg: For this table project or generally?

Cristiane: Specifically for this work [Auf den Tisch!].

Meg: The first thing is the set up, which is a very clear proposal and has been in every edition of Auf den Tisch!. So the set up is not a general improvisation, but indicates that it is a conference. There is a guideline that we are in a conference situation and these four microphones before us are always the starting image, the starting point, which indicates to the performers that dialogue, exchange and debate are as important as movement. I started asking each performer to come with something, either a score, a proposal or a stand which they want to put on the table, and we have some rehearsals. We met on Tuesday (Nov 3rd) for the first show, which was on Friday (Nov 6th) and we met audience for the dress rehearsal when it became clear what the issues of the performers are. I would say with that there is a kind of loose score that melts people together.

Cristiane: So you do not establish a sequence from the scores every performer brought to you during the rehearsals?

Meg: No. Not at all.

Cristiane: Things just happen?

Meg: I think they happen by dialogue because there are intentions others put out. We want intimate conversation, we want to talk about certain topics, and things are expressed in this rehearsal period, which are at hand to be accessed by people during the performance.

Cristiane: That’s interesting. So, each performer has to understand the moment to bring his/her specific issue to the table... There is not a sequence, at all?

Trajal: No.

Cristiane: What made me think it really was? I really thought it was.

Meg: It is the beginning. And I forget to really stick to that beginning because I think it signifies a listening and everybody is talking about the body and it is talking about a shared body and a shared body of knowledge… It kind of tunes the audience for all that kind of democratic space, because we are all in that listening space, and we are already expressing that. The audio input is as important as the visual input. And that is kind of put that way right at the beginning. I think that is a very clear start.

Cristiane: Yeah. It is the kind of project that relies a lot on the ability of listening and perceiving the right moment to bring things out, change or shift what is going on. How to perceive that as a performer and how to deal with this kind of information?

Trajal: It is very specific to the framework of the conference. I think this is such a strong proposal because it is being in a conference. I think we really try not to play conference. We are in a discussion, we are developing a certain way of thinking about improvisation, a certain way of improvising and we are conferencing, so listening is inevitable and inextricable to having the conference. And for the performers, it has to be negotiated through listening and through speaking and through performing, and all those things require a level of history that we develop through rehearsals as Meg was just saying. I think when it comes to the listening it is not radical because it has to be, you have to listen if it is going to function really.

Meg: I think if you bring an international group of performers and improvisers and you put them together and say, “Okay, now we are going to perform”, this sharing of knowledge and these negotiations, this meeting, diverse languages, being in the moment, listening and responding, it is all already present. Somehow we are just making it more visible. It is becoming visible because of the way the space is delineated, but it is already present when good improvisers are together. We are tuning or amplifying that, so it is more present. I think there is one layer for the audience but there is another layer for the performers where they have a chance also to point out, to reflect, not only to dance but also to have a shared discourse about improvisation, another subject...

Cristiane: I thought that was very interesting because even though it is implicit to improvisation listening to the other’s body and in this case to the other’s speech too, we tend to consider more important to speak than to listen. I felt it was an interesting negotiation you allowed us to experience together with the performers at the moment they are dealing with that. Talking about performers, how did you arrive to this specific group of artists? I am talking about the cast for New York.

Meg: I wanted to have some people from New York and some people from Europe, and not necessarily a comfortable group, but a group that are somehow connected or that I felt connected to. Yvonne Meier, for example, I met twenty years ago and even studied with her a little bit and I was very interested in her approach to scores. Keith Hennessy I just met recently and he took my workshop in a very intense short meeting. I wanted to have also a very mature group and a group where there would be a certain amount of tension because it would be different ideologies, different practices, different kind of approaches meeting each other. I also wanted dancers/performers that I knew very well—Vania (Rovisco) has been in my work, and we’ve worked together for 5 years. But she is another generation, she is improvising on her own. And then Anja (Müller), is now in my current work (Do Animals Cry - 2009) so she is someone I just spent a year improvising with everyday in the studio. Personally I was interested in different kinds of approaches, different histories for me to cross. I wanted people that were as much thinkers and that feel very comfortable to speak and that can very fluently go between action and reflection, between talking and doing.

Trajal: I think it was also my input knowing the New York scene a bit. I was trying to find different people who had a relationship to improvisation but who come from a different point of view or different ideologies or methodologies. I think that was essential because, of course, David, Yvonne and I are quite different. Yvonne has a strong legacy of improvising in New York and she is a certain symbol of the history of improvisation in New York. And David Thomson is someone who is quite well known as being this incredible dancer in New York, but he also has been seen improvising a lot. He comes from the Trisha Brown history in his body, and he has worked with Ralph Lemon, among others. I think improvisation has being a good part of his practice working with these choreographers. George Emilio Sanchez I know as someone whom I have heard speak a lot and who is very opinionated. He also has a very direct relationship to this history and scene because he has been a chairman of the board of Movement Research and he performs a lot in shows that are in the dance world. So I thought he would be someone who would bring a very verbal acuity to all of this but also would relate, because he has a relationship to the stage practice. Myself, I studied improvisation more as a very young student in theater, much more so than now. I mean, only now is it starting to kind of be a part of my research and the way I compose. Because of wanting certain possibilities in the work, improv is a way of inviting a different kind of texture in the work. I think many choreographers today are using improvisation in that way… but I have to say my strongest sense of improvisation comes from being a very small child in the African-American church and the sense of the extraordinary vocal and physical language that happens there. This is what I remember so much. When I heard about improvisation, I was “Oh, this is very related to what was going on in my kind of Southern culture”. Even my grandfather singing on the porch. My grandfather sang blues all the time on the porch. He had a group and they would sing when they got together around his house. It was very normal. And sometimes kids on the street would start teaching a new dance and it was always improvised. But in my artistic practice, I never really dug deep into improvisation or contact improvisation. Although I looked at it a lot, it was not a part of my studio practice.

Cristiane: I think there is a division and a kind of conflict between work that is rehearsed and work that is improvised, but as you were saying, many dances are improvised; it is a natural thing to improvise. In street dances people relate to that in a more natural way. And bringing that to a performance space – again, there is a whole history in improvisation -, but I think it is an interesting thing to put that in a conference where people can look at it from a different angle and discuss it or watch a discussion on improvisation in a maybe – more formal way, since a conference is something that is very formal in relation to a form that is somehow opposite of this kind of established structure.

Trajal: Yeah, it is very difficult. That is what makes Keith really interesting because he has also been writing his Ph.D., I can’t say exactly what his Ph.D. thesis is on, but I know that he is doing a lot on improvisation in different ways—and that is very clear when he engages in dialogue about improvisation at the table. It’s very clear that he’s been developing an intelligent way of thinking and writing about these issues. But in general I think the language of how we talk about improvisation is still being developed and still being argued, and that it is still in a kind of discursive problem area. Even to say improvisation is rehearsed is questionable for some people. It is not something that is not rehearsed just because it is not repeated. We are rehearsing; we are going to rehearse now.

Meg: I am trained in contact [Improvisation], and I felt it came very easy to me and I enjoyed it because I felt very comfortable somehow. But then I realized that there was a big gap between what I wanted to show in my own work which is about the problems of communication, things that block people from being together, and I did not want this… For me things aren’t equal necessarily, it is not like “I roll on you, you roll on me” and we have this shared agreement. Normally there is much more tension, and I wanted to also pull out this tension. So I was always trying to figure out how I can push contact by taking some of the principles and either moving into other fields—like Contact with visual artists, Contact with musicians or space—or in what way can we work with different languages and, not disagreements, but things becoming more jarring, pressing up against each other. This has being a kind of ongoing search for me in all different ways.

Cristiane: One of the things that I am interested in is the tension between the spontaneity of speech and movement and the relation of a certain kind of pressure in saying the right thing or the coherent thing to start a movement, action or reflection or disrupt it. So how does it work while you are performing? How do you deal with this tension between spontaneity and pressure?

(Silence)

Meg: I do not know quite what you mean in terms of pressure…

Cristiane: Basically… (Looking at Trajal’s face) You know what I mean, right?

Trajal: Yeah, I experience this a lot in performance. I think it has to do with risk and experience. I mean, the best improvisers are very attuned in some ways. [To Meg,] And you are very good at this because I have learned a lot by watching you do this. It is a level of being in tune with yourself, what’s going on with yourself, and also knowing the whole so well… You have an impulse: is it the time for that impulse? Of course, if you think about that impulse too much it kills it… so it is an attunement and a constant calibration of things… it is playing an instrument, you are both playing the instrument of your individual performance and the instrument of the whole performance. And that is what the best improvisers do, they are able to take those risks, not worry, trust, go in, deep in, you know… They are able to play with that. It is a challenge, it is hard, it is hell. I mean, that is the thing. Of course, you have a huge amount of pressure to do something, to make the thing work and you can’t just be “doing” all the time.

Meg: Yeah… I think restraint and not doing is a big action. That is a very powerful, very important choice. And also just always remember the context. I mean, like where you are so you are not just carried away by the moment and also know that it is on a timeline. It is an event that it is marked in time so there is a difference between the first minute and the tenth minute and the thirtieth minute. There is also somehow trying to keep track, so it’s not just passing through a reel but somehow there is like, “OK, this event has happened, this event is happening, this person is here”… so you just really have tuned in with the timing of the whole thing as well.

Cristiane: Have you ever had audience members who spontaneously came up to the microphones to speak or on the table to perform with you?

Meg: Not spontaneously, I mean even in the dress rehearsal we invited two audience members to dance at the end and at the end we asked some questions. I thought it was quite interesting. We talked about “is there discourse in New York or not about improvisation?” And then one of the audience members says there is no discourse in New York. Point. And then some of the audience members added their thoughts about that. So I thought it was quite exciting when they get involved in the discussion, but for the most part we have not had a kind of sabotage action or somebody who is pushing and I think they have been quite respectful. I mean, it does seem they are open but they don’t sort of like jump right in without a kind of gesture or invitation.

Cristiane: How do you act as a moderator of this conference with the time of the action? Last night you didn’t interfere so much, right?

Meg: I’m not the moderator in that sense. I mean, I had the set up and we together [with Trajal] chose the cast, but I have to have a profound trust in them and also the nature of improvisation. The agreements are made by the group—this specific group—and they are discussed: how much structure we have or not. And there is a certain amount of trust, so somehow, at the point of the show, I am also on pretty much equal ground. Because I think if you start censoring in the midst of that it can be quite dangerous. I mean, there is a way to say like “OK, this is missing, I will put my input in or this thing is to take off, or on a certain level I want to see this”, but not to sort of cut people off or sort of clip their impulses because that can cause a real blockage to expression in the group.

Cristiane: I like to think about this political body on that space and at the same time to think about the political or activist speech and how in certain moments it appears in the dance work. Many times I keep asking myself why to dance or why to watch dance, or why to write about dance, and somehow for me, personally speaking, the biggest thing about dance is the political act of moving the body in a freer way. How do you relate to that when you bring this kind of political speech to the table, and of course, it comes from different people and their specific issues, but how do you perceive this political speech and why this is so important right now?

Trajal: I think for myself there are three ways I can answer that question… one is that the personal is political, the choices we make, the things we put on the stage, the way we create the conditions, the practices that we develop around work…

Cristiane: The choice of being in it.

Trajal: This is political. For me, doing this project is political. I step into it fully because I believe it is radical and it is important that dance have a voice, especially in New York, and it is like someone said that night, there is no discourse in New York. Well, it is true, there is no discourse and it is quite marginalized, which we know about dance in New York and many of us who are working in dance are constantly trying to solve this. Number two, I think within this context of Performa, it is very important that we talk about this form. It is not at all a protest, but it is a great political testament to have it in this festival, and for people to begin thinking about it and to see its value and to read this interview about it… because that is what is incredible about this form: there is a limit, let’s get real, you know. Balanchine said there are no stepbrothers in dance. And I always remember this because it is really true. Unless you say he is the stepbrother it is really hard to make a movement to figure out that that person is a stepbrother, okay? And I think stepbrother is very important because of course, “step” is not just about being the brother, it is about the politics of marriage and divorce and blah, blah, blah. So, when we think about this kind of form, it allows for another level of approaching dance, of politicizing dance, thinking about these cultural, social issues around improvisation. Like Meg said before in another answer, it amplifies them in a way that makes it visible for an audience. Three, I think in this context of New York has such a political function, and I am not just talking about education and making people think that is good, but I think we really have to re-evaluate the role of the arts in culture and society. Meg asked the question the other day “do soldiers in Afghanistan improvise?” I mean, that says it all right there.

Meg: I think also it is a crossing of forms, I mean there is improvisation and performance, but you could also see it as a kind of extension of this renewed interest in the Movement Research [Performance] Journal and also, somehow the practitioners themselves can own their own discourse. And it’s bringing discourse back to the body. It is not like there are not experts talking about what they are doing, or critics saying what dancers and choreographers are doing, what are doing, but they are also with themselves saying, “hey, we also want to discuss among ourselves, we want to have this kind of platform for ourselves”. I think it is interesting that everyone that is on this table as a practitioner is also sharing the same risk. Sometimes I find it hard when people make work and then a critic shows up or an expert shows up, but [here] I love it …I think it is political that we are all risking in all senses, even the ones asking the questions, the ones answering, the ones lying on the floor, the one getting naked… and we are all put on this shared level, I think that’s very critical as well.

Trajal: Yeah.

Cristiane: It is very interesting to see this political aspect more and more in dance, because theater has a long tradition of political theater, and dance is getting more and more political not only in a thematic way, but in its action. This work is an important platform to reflect that through this crossing of backgrounds and issues. I am also intrigued by the NATO conference picture used to promote your work. I can see a couple layers of significance in that, but I would like you to talk a little bit about the decision of choosing that picture…

Meg: Yeah, I think everyone can immediately have some sort of image of it, it talks about the people on this table are experts, but I think also there is a whole series of translations and different points of view. There is much understanding, but there is also misunderstanding and miscommunication and lobbying. … Let’s say people have issues… yeah. I think I just put it in another space rather than show a picture of a dinner table or other kinds of tables with large groups that you can imagine. And also you get clearly this idea of conferencing and that there are things to be worked out.

Cristiane: And NATO is an organization about security and you are talking about risk…

Meg: It can be also, yeah. I think crisis and emergency are often a given when you talk about improv.

Cristiane: I like to think about how the dimensionality of things can completely change our perception. I really felt affected by that huge table and the way its image could become a stage but also flows to the image of a celebratory space or a conference table… So, you created a space that could become many spaces. Do you have something to say about that flow between the political, the stage and the celebratory aspects of it?

(Silence)

Cristiane: (smiling) Maybe it is just my personal reading.

Meg: Yeah…

Trajal: I think it is pure potentiality. (pause) It is all there…

Meg: I would hope that when there is an action – I do not even want to call it physicality or movement - on the table, that it is also another way of perceiving it… even if it is not defined or it is not framed by those speaking, even if it is just silence, I mean, movement with music, it feels like that is speaking, it is expressing… you know, you don’t say “Okay, here is the dance part”. But I hope also kind of makes you perceive it differently because of the context. I mean, for me I often see movement as text, I see it as authoring, I see it as expressing. I work with the intelligence of every single part of the body and how it can express someone and what else it is expressing between languages or beyond language... and I have a lot of faith in the body and the movement as well! Yeah, that is also another part, a kind of platform for this. It is part of what we want to push as well.

Cristiane: The light and sound cues were also improvised? I mean, it is clear there are cues, but do they choose what to use in specific moments?

Meg: They are improvising, it does not mean they are not preparing, I mean, all day yesterday Jan (Maertens) was here, they were following our meetings and our sessions and both Jan and Hahn (Rowe) I worked with - I mean Hahn for a very long time but Jan for many productions - so, they were improvising with the experience of the kind to find tune and awareness… for Jan, he has been following this Auf den Tisch! projects, but there are no set directions … I mean, they discuss, Jan discusses his concept with me, but they are making their own choices during the course of the evening.

Cristiane: Is there something important you would like to say about the project that we did not
mention?

(Silence)

Cristiane: Information about the future of this project you would like to share?

Meg: There are no future plans, though I feel it was the right project in the right time at the right place, let’s put it that way. I felt I was really happy with the response of the audience last night. With the dancers, it is not about liking or not liking or having a good evening… it was like… I think it ran quite deep and made people really think about what they were doing, think about the kind of dialogue they were having and I think it is a big meeting. You know, I have this vision this table could stay in New York and other people could improvise on it or work on it. I feel there is a need for this… I am curious how that is going to move things in relation to exchange and improvisation in New York. I hope it does.